Sweet (14 page)

“How long was it before you started thinking about dating again,” Jules asked around the lump in his throat, “after Mom left?”

“Oh,” Ray said, and Jules heard the static scratch of the phone against his shoulder as he shifted in his chair. “That. I don’t know why I didn’t see this one coming.”

“Dad, I’m serious.”

“Are you thinking about starting to date?” Ray asked.

“I wasn’t. I didn’t think I would. But I met someone and then I wanted to, and he kissed me and I kissed him back, but I feel—how long is okay?—I’ve been seeing Andy. In dreams. Every night. He begs me not to go away,” he finished, and let out in one long sigh all the breath he’d been holding in. He had the locket—
Andy’s locket—clutched in his left hand; he’d unstrung it from Andy’s collar in the middle of the night and slept with it, and then kept it all morning in his pocket, where he could worry it with his fingers. He couldn’t let it go.

“The dreams are you, you know, Jules. That’s you begging yourself,” his dad said.

“That doesn’t make sense. It’s making me miserable. I feel guilty enough already.”

“I think you’re right,” Ray said. “You do.”

“I can’t stop feeling that,” Jules said weakly.

“Jules,” his dad said (Jules saw him press the pads of his fingers to his temples and squint as if he had a headache, as he did when Jules was being especially unreasonable or inscrutable—which was, according to Ray, entirely too often), “put the locket in your desk drawer.”

Jules’s heart lurched.
His father always, always knew, as if he could see him, hundreds of miles away, hiding like a mouse by the ovens. He dropped the locket on the desk and pressed it there with his finger as his father spoke.

“It’s a piece of jewelry. It’s a memory. You can’t cheat on a memory. You can keep it or you can let it go, but it won’t change any bit of what you had or the fact that you lost it. You can be happy or you can be miserable, kid, and that’s in your hands.”

“He’s almost the complete opposite of Andy.” Saying that out loud made a new wave of guilt roll up like nausea in Jules’s stomach. “Andy would probably eat him for breakfast.”

“Unless this guy is The Hulk, he would probably only be an appetizer,” his dad laughed. “As I recall, Andy’s appetite was bigger than Nathan’s and Zack’s put together.”

Jules smiled, then, though he knew exactly what his father was doing. He decided, for once, to let him do it, to let it work. “The flapjacks,” he said, and heard his father snort back a laugh.

“The Lumberjack of Jane Street!” Ray yelled imperiously, and sent them both into a ridiculous and childish fit of giggling.

“Pearl Bunyan,” Jules whispered and giggled again.

“Johnny Dapperseed.”

“Gay-vee Crocket.”

They giggled like idiots, and Jules felt free and happy and so close to his dad that his heart squeezed around the moment and he let go of everything else. His dad’s hands, wide and paint-streaked and strong, would always hold him up and push him forward. His voice was a tether; his heart was a rocket; he listened with his whole body; Jules loved him like crazy.

Ray was making high, hysterical whooping sounds, and it struck Jules just how much laughing sounded like crying. It was simply, he thought, a matter of context. 

*

Pastry-Whipped: Adventures in Sugar by a Dedicated Crumpet Strumpet

by Chef Jules Burns of Buttermilk Bakery

April 30: Then Practice Losing Farther, Losing Faster

In case you don’t recognize it, I stole that line from Elizabeth Bishop. Or borrowed, perhaps. Or better yet, I’ve relocated it. Put it here, where it can make another life and mean something new. Stealing, in this case, is a noble act. It’s liberation.

Speaking of new meanings, let me tell you a story about two of my favorite people in the entire world: my father, Ray, and my once-upon-a-time love, Andy. When Andy first met my father, he was terrified of the man. This is not surprising: My father, though he’s neither tall nor especially brawny, is powerful and frightening and bigger than his body. He can stare you down and he can see through you and he is so entirely self-possessed (he has, as that might mean, hold of his own soul in a way most of us will never manage) that everyone who meets him wants his approval
immediately. He is completely, unavoidably, present and solid; next to him, the rest of us look like ghosts. My father, if you’ll forgive the pun, matters.

So when Andy came home with me that first Christmas to meet him, he was bone-deep terrified of the man. It didn’t help that Andy was, in nearly every way, the complete opposite of my dad; they had nothing in common, at least on the surface. My dad is butch, to put it mildly, an Indiana house painter who likes football and hamburgers and women (usually all at the same time); what could he possibly share with a Black, gay, white-collar Brooklyn native who loved Madonna and silver nail polish?

Pancakes, as it turns out. The world is smaller than we think.

After discovering this fact in an awkward series of question-and-answer sessions with my father, each of which lasted exactly the length of
one commercial break during
Ice Road Truckers
(my father roots for the accidents because they are exciting and he can talk about appropriate tire pressure and snow chains to anyone who’ll listen), Andy got up early on Christmas morning to make my father some special, hearty Christmas morning pancakes. He thought, however, that he’d make them extra-manly, just to show my dad that he could be an excellent son, even if he’d never played touch football and owned nary a rugby shirt or baseball cap and fell asleep before the truckers got to the end of the ice road. Extra-manly, of course, to a gay boy who’d never left New York City, means lumberjacky. And lumberjack, as you probably are thinking, spells flapjacks.

So Andy, who had many talents but could not count cooking among them, looked up a flapjack recipe online, followed it to the letter and pulled from the oven, proudly and with a very manly flourish, the finished product. And my father, napkin tucked into his shirt collar, fork in hand, looked at the tray of lumpy, oaty
stuff and said, his disappointment thick and barely hidden, “Where’s the flapjacks?”

I should explain. It was a case of mistaken identity. Though Americans often use the term “flapjack” to refer to what is really a pancake, a British flapjack is something closer to a granola bar or, at the very least, a sugary lump of oats and raisins. I don’t know what that man thought the oven would magically do to that stuff in the pan to turn it into what he thought a flapjack should be. Poor Andy. For the next Christmas, my dad got him a pink flannel shirt. My dad could be an unforgiving man.

Of course, my father thought Andy was a more than excellent son, not because he was manly or made Christmas granola lumps, but because he loved me and he loved my father and he tried so hard. And because he wore that damn pink flannel shirt every time
—
every single time
—
we saw my dad—
wore it like a badge and a scarlet letter all at once. And because he sat through
Ice Road Truckers
without complaint, though he couldn’t be counted on to stay awake.

What does all of this have to do with losing—which is where, if you’ve not lost track already, I began this essay? Everything from this story is gone now: Andy is gone; that Christmas morning is long gone; the flapjacks and the flapjack secret recipe, both quite gone; my father, though he’s still technically around, isn’t the imposing father-in-law-guard-dog-torturer he once was, and the kid that I was then, madly in love and irritated and untouchable and righteously sure of himself, he’s forever gone, too. Even that ridiculous pink flannel shirt has disappeared now to parts unknown, cavorting, I’m sure, with the world’s lost socks and loose change in the L
and of Lost Things. I’ve lost, in one way or another, all of that.

This isn’t actually quite true. Loss is never whole or complete. Because the word “flapjack” still makes me giggle senselessly, and I still sometimes talk to Andy in my sleep. And love and comfort and safety, family and fond ridicule, mistakes and the room to make them, those are still around. The feeling of being in love; of knowing everything for sure and feeling, at the same time, tipped off balance; of being at once very old and very young; Christmas mornings and first impressions and things that will still be remembered and retold in twenty years, and the feeling that time is slipping away too fast and I can’t keep anything long enough, all those things are still around. They just come to me now in different guises, in new shirts, with new meanings, and I have to be wise enough to recognize them when they do.

And, I think,
Ice Road Truckers
is still going strong.

My dad recently told me: You can be happy, or you can be miserable, and the difference is entirely up to you.

Let me, then, be wise and in love with the world enough always to see new meanings in things and always recognize the familiar wonders that come to me in new shirts and new shapes. Let me lose and let me let go and let me still want to hold on; let me feel ancient and new all at once, secure and tipped off my feet; let me be a thief, or a borrower—a relocator, a liberator—of my own joy. Let me be brave enough (write it! Bishop is whispering) to be happy.

*

I know,
Teddy wrote when he’d finally lugged himself home, showered, unpacked and set himself gently down to rest in the quiet of his rooms,
that we’re not scheduled for dinner until tomorrow, but could we change plans? It was a long trip, and I’m tired of distance and quiet and I want some conversation and some company. I want to see you. And I know all of this probably makes me sound needy or eager or weird, but I think you’ve already seen me that way and you haven’t run screaming yet. So I’m taking a chance here. Can I see you tonight?

Twelve

Jules opened the top drawer
of his nightstand and let the silver locket fall in with a soft clink. He’d been carrying it around all day in his pocket, unable to make himself reattach it to Andy’s collar, and now that simply seemed inappropriate. So he let the locket go.

His rooms were well kept, always lived-in but beautiful enough that if, by some strange chance, the camera crew for an interior decorating magazine showed up on his doorstep, lost and hungry and desperate, he might take them in, and they’d beg to photograph his place instead of wherever it was they’d been trying to go, simply because it was so stunning—
and on so small a budget!
they would exclaim when he revealed that it was mostly thrifted and scrounged at
curbsides. His rooms were beautiful in preparation for the wandering photography crew, yes, and also because when Jules was nervous, he cleaned.

So he lily-gilded to pass the time that night. He mopped the floors and scrubbed the counters, scrubbed even the light-switch plates in every room until they shone; he dusted the stacks of his grandmother’s books and records that leaned against the main room’s brick wall and pulled the covers so tightly over the top of his bed that—and he really did try it
, just to see—he could bounce a quarter on them. He lit the main room with the bright overhead, then with the low-light dimmer and then considered putting out candles, but finally settled on using the little floor lamp with the blue glass shade that made the room feel cool and otherworldly, aquatic and intimate.

He still had twenty minutes before Teddy was due to knock on his door and he’d already redone his hair twice and changed his clothing several times. He’d even bathed Andy and dried him with the hair dryer and a wire brush until he shone and smelled sweet and looked miserable. They were as polished, the two of them, as they might get. So Jules sat (carefully, so as not to rumple his third pair of pants) at the window ledge and stared out at the blank, over-lit sky, at the gray building across the street and its massive tree that never seemed entirely to let go its brown and crumpled leaves, but held them and shook like a rattle in the wind.

“Because I thought it would be rude to be late,” said a raised
voice below him, testy but still kind, and Jules looked down. It was him, Jules was sure, even from this height and this angle. He was gesturing with one arm and cradling a cell phone against his ear with the other.

“Maggie, please just be nice for another fifteen minutes, then I can go,” he whined. “I’m completely nervous and I need to talk to someone who will keep me calm, and you’re the next best thing.”

Jules smiled to himself. He could, he knew, sit for the next fifteen minutes and watch Teddy, but he wouldn’t. He would send a text, so as not to startle him, and he’d let him know it was okay to come in. He took up his phone, but just couldn’t make himself duck away from the window. He did, however, hunker down a bit, so that he wasn’t so visible. He wasn’t, he thought,
that
crazy.

I’m not spying, but is that you out there?
he typed into his phone.

A moment later, Teddy looked up and about wildly, and Jules hunched down a bit further against the sill.

“I have to go,” Teddy said into the phone in a stage whisper. “I think I’ve been made.” He waited a moment, listening and still scanning the building front for an explanation, then, again into the phone
: “You’re disgusting. I will not. I’m hanging up now.”

When he had hung up the phone, Jules typed,
I’m pretty sure it’s you. I’m buzzing you up, so if it’s not you and you’re a marauder, please be gentle when you maraud. I bruise easily.

Teddy turned his face upward with the broadest, most open smile, and his eyes seemed to lock, for a moment, on the corner of the window where Jules had thought he was invisibly huddled.

“I’ll be gentle,” he called up, his eyes scanning. “I’m a gentleman marauder. I’ll only take what you say I can have.”

Jules smiled again and pocketed his phone. He got up and dusted himself off before heading to the intercom by the door, glancing first out the window one last time to see Teddy, looking down now and turned toward the heavy front door, patient and still, waiting for Jules to let him in.

*

The apartment was small, with white walls and one of brick, low-lit and warm with the yeasty smell of bread. In it was a soft, rumpled couch slip-covered in natural linen and heaped with pillows of the same shade; there were gauzy curtains and piles of books, a hulking cut-glass mirror leaned against the brick and a faded Oriental rug rested on the scuffed wood floor. A pair of bright yellow rain boots, the high kind, with buckles, was neatly aligned on a mat by the door, and at the table near the tiny kitchen were a pair of the same stools Teddy knew from the bakery, with the same worn and melting velvet cushions. On a garnet-colored pillow by the couch, a sleepy dachshund eyed Teddy with equal parts distrust and interest. A little blue lamp near the table cast the room in its little blue glow, and everything felt underwater-strange and breath-holdingly beautiful.

“I baked some bread already because it takes so much time, but I saved the rest for us to do together,” Jules said before Teddy
had managed to get his shoes all the way off.

“I wasn’t spying on you,” Jules added while Teddy was awkwardly bent over and struggling with his shoelaces (he had the feeling that if he simply toed off the shoes as he normally did, he might unfavorably impress Jules, and he didn’t want to start the evening on that, so to speak, foot). “I happened to look out and I saw you on the stoop, and I thought it was silly if you were planning to stand there for twenty minutes just so you wouldn’t be early.” He paused again, watching Teddy struggle with the knotted shoelace he probably hadn’t undone in months.
I will,
Teddy thought,
take these shoes off like a human being and a gentleman, even if it kills me.

“Not that I’m calling you silly,” Jules said quickly, when Teddy still hadn’t answered (though he’d tried to peep up and smile reassuringly at Jules while he fumbled with the knot). “I’m calling
me
silly. Because it would have been silly to let you stand out there, just waiting for me. Unless—” and Jules’s face went a bit paler than it already was, “Did I force you in? Were you doing something important out there?”

Teddy stopped and relinquished his efforts with the lace. “No,” he smiled up at Jules. “Nothing important. Just killing time because I was too early.
I can be a little compulsive, is all. You caught me.” He tried to beam, tried to send all his good and willing thoughts up through his eyes and his smile to Jules, while his fingers, despite his decision to let it go, picked at the knot in his shoe.

“Here,” Jules said, and bent down on one knee at Teddy’s feet. “Let me, before you injure yourself on this.” Teddy watched him curl downward and set to work on the shoe. It made Teddy feel regal and dainty and attended to, near swooning and awkward, helpless and childlike, all at once. Jules’s hands were at his feet; his head bent so near Teddy’s knee that little wisps of his hair clung with static to the fabric of Teddy’s pants. At the back of Jules’s neck, where the collar of his shirt gaped open slightly as he bent his head forward,
the hair was a lighter blond, though that seemed impossible; it was almost transparent, and very short and soft-looking. Teddy’s hand was on its way to rest there gently, fondly, when Jules looked up triumphantly and said, “You’re free!” and pulled the shoe from his foot.

“Okay,” Teddy stammered and slipped his hand under his own thigh to hold it there. “My hero.” He wiggled his bare toes.

“I’ve made you a
reverse Cinderella,” Jules said, climbing back to his feet and holding out his hand for Teddy to take, “about which I’m not sure… is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

Teddy put his hand into Jules’s and pulled to get up, but felt the sickening slide of his nerves: His palm was wet and a little too slippery, and they missed twice before they got a grip good enough for him to get up.

“Sorry,” he said, pulling his hand back and wiping it on his pants. “I’m really nervous for some reason.” And then he added, because he couldn’t stop his mouth from doing it, “I don’t know why I’m so nervous. I’ve kissed you already.” And then, because he really couldn’t stop his mouth, he said, “Not that I think it’s a done deal, or anything. Not that kissing you before means I think I can just do it any time I want. I just mean—”

“We could get it out of the way now,” Jules suggested simply. He leaned forward to cup Teddy’s jaw with one hand, while the other wound around Teddy’s waist and pulled him in. Teddy’s arms dangled at his sides because his aching body felt loose and useless, and he said, under his breath and completely redundantly, “Okay.”
Jules kissed him softly on the mouth, the briefest kiss, dry and gentle and tentative and sweet, leaving a second delicate kiss at the corner of his lips before he pulled away.

“Very smooth,” Teddy said, fanning himself and batting his eyelashes, because Jules was deeply red and staring fixedly at his own bare feet. “First the shoe and now the kiss. Are you hiding a pumpkin and some mice somewhere in here?”

“You’re mocking me now.”

“No,” Teddy said seriously, dipping his head to try to catch Jules’s eye. “I’m swooning. For real.”

“Yes. Well.”

There was, after that, nothing that Teddy could say in response, because Jules hadn’t really said anything at all, and it was clear from the way he was watching his own toes grind against the rubbed-raw wood of the floor that he wasn’t planning to say anything more. So Teddy, with his stomach twisting and his hands sweating and his throat closing around a lump that felt like hope and fear and happiness, put his hands on Jules’s clavicles and said, “You’re making me so nervous. I’m a wreck,” and pressed his lips to Jules’s forehead in a gentle kiss until Jules looked up. And then Teddy kissed him again, on the mouth, a kiss that really counted, with his eyes closed tight and his fingers pressing against the sharp bones of Jules’s shoulders.

“I’m terribly nervous here, too, you know,” Jules said to the floor when Teddy had stopped kissing him. “I don’t really do this.”

“Let the hoi polloi get so close? Let one of your many wild admirers kiss you in your kitchen?” Teddy smirked and squeezed Jules’s shoulders.

“Date,” Jules said quietly and looked Teddy in the eye so suddenly and directly and with such clear gray eyes that Teddy felt his heart squeeze and bang hard in his throat.

“We should start that, then,” Teddy said. “Maybe we should get cooking?”

“This is nice,” Jules said, touching the lapels of Teddy’s gray suit jacket with two gentle fingers. “You should take it off first.”

Teddy hung his jacket over the seat of a stool and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, while Jules poured generous splashes of P
inot into two mason jars. Under Jules’s direction, they made a sauce of wild mushrooms, celeriac and leeks to spread across a fluttery, hand-rolled pasta. They roasted squash and beets until they were sweet and caramel-brown. They tossed them with figs into a bowl of bitter greens and a curried almond dressing Jules whisked by hand. They moved quietly around each other in Jules’s compact kitchen, each laying a hand lightly on the other’s hip or waist and pressing gently to pass. They picked at smoked olives and aged Gouda; they broke the bread open and mopped it through olive oil and coarse salt; they drank the wine.

When they had finished cooking, they ate quietly at the tiny table by the light of the little blue lamp, with their forks chiming dimly against their plates in quiet agreement, as if they had done it that way together, at that little table, for years. The near silence between them was comfortable and rich and sweet, while in the background, Jules’s stereo crooned low with the voices of women—Bessie Smith, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan—who were tough and sad and lost and gone.

*

So much of the time he had known Teddy, Jules thought, had been spent in conversation; tonight, for hours, there nearly were no words between them. In the kitchen, they’d gestured, pressed and simply
known,
moving around each other in a dance they’d never before performed but understood intimately all the same.

Afterward, they sat on the sloping, sunken couch with Andy between them, drinking the dregs of the wine and peeling peaches into a large bowl. Every few minutes, when he thought Jules wasn’t looking, Teddy slipped Andy a small slice of peach peel.

“If you keep doing that,” Jules said, “he’s going to vomit. And I
will
make you clean it up.”

“The peels have all the vitamins,” Teddy said, popping a piece into his own mouth.

“He’s a very old dog,” Jules said dryly. “He doesn’t
need
vitamins. He needs not to eat things like shoelaces or pinecones or peach skin.”

For a moment, there was only the
snick snick
of their peelers on the fruit, and then Teddy put his peeled peach into the bowl, wiped his hands on the towel in his lap and ran his fingers through the fur at the nape of Andy’s neck. “Is he,” he began
, then stopped.

“He’s thirteen,” Jules said, without glancing up. “Which is, for a dog like him,
elderly.
” He whispered the word, as if he didn’t want Andy to hear it.

“No, I know. I mean, is he named after your… Is he named after Andy?”