Sweet Like Sugar (29 page)

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Authors: Wayne Hoffman

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #General, #Jewish Men, #Male Friendship, #Rabbis, #Jewish, #Religion, #Jewish Gay Men, #Judaism

BOOK: Sweet Like Sugar
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“He doesn't sound so bad,” Jamie said.
“Great, now you're taking his side,” I said.
“I'm not taking anyone's side. All I know is that if you hadn't met the rabbi, you never would have flown to Miami over Thanksgiving,” he said. “I never would have met you, and I wouldn't be sitting here now thinking about how sweet you are and hoping that you'll want to skip dessert so we can go home already.”
I looked into his eyes and realized I'd spent the better part of dinner talking about a sick old man when I had an adorable young guy sitting across the table from me. One had kicked me out of his house, while the other was inviting me into his.
I caught the waiter's eye and motioned for the check.
 
Jamie was unlike anyone I'd dated before, I soon realized.
He was funny and cute and bright—but I'd dated other men who possessed these qualities, albeit not usually all three simultaneously. We shared similar tastes in music, politics, and clothes, although, again, the same could be said of several erstwhile prospective boyfriends of mine.
What was different about Jamie is that he asked questions, real questions, and persisted until I gave him real answers.
Other guys had looked at my graphic design projects and said they liked them, sometimes offering a hint of enthusiasm or a relatively specific bit of praise. But Jamie was the first to ask why I'd made certain choices—why this color, why that font, why those images—in a way that showed real interest. He listened to my answers as I explained some basic principles behind my work, eager to learn more. And he wasn't afraid to be critical, in a gentle way, if he didn't like what I'd done.
He was equally curious about my personal relationships—and not just with the rabbi. He wasn't particularly close to his parents, who had recently retired and moved to Arizona; they weren't as intrusive as my folks just a few miles away, but they also weren't as accepting of their gay son. Jamie didn't have a Michelle in his life, either: His roommate was just a random guy he'd found online and he'd lost touch with his college friends, most of whom lived thousands of miles away.
Jamie had grown up in Minneapolis. Both his parents worked at the state university there: his father as a professor in the biology department, his mother as an administrator in the registrar's office. Mr. Cohen was Jewish, tracing his lineage to Lithuania by way of Toronto. Mrs. Cohen—née Lindstrom—was a Lutheran of Swedish heritage. Rejected by both families and both religious communities because of their interfaith coupling, the Cohens raised Jamie and his sister in a household that was both Christian and Jewish and yet neither at the same time. They had a Christmas tree, but never went to church; they ate matzoh instead of bread on Passover but never had a seder. Jamie had a bris, but no bar mitzvah; he went to a Christian private school and a Reform synagogue's Sunday school through sixth grade, when he switched to public school and got his Sundays back.
It was only when he got to Berkeley that Jamie embraced his Judaism. He took a Jewish studies class, went to Shabbat dinners at the Chabad house on campus, checked out a few of Hillel's holiday events. There were always a few naysayers who told him that he wasn't really a Jew—because his mother was a gentile, because he'd never been bar mitzvahed—yet for the first time in his life, Jamie felt Jewish. Whatever that meant.
But the usual means of association weren't there: Synagogue was alien to Jamie, and he didn't have any personal connection to traditional holiday rituals. He wasn't about to join a JCC or subscribe to the local Jewish newspaper. So once he left Berkeley, and there were no more classes or events or Friday night dinners, he was on his own again. Questions remained, but he didn't have anyone to give him answers.
He found a group in Washington for “interfaith” Jews, but it was aimed at couples from different religious back-grounds—not individuals who had dual backgrounds. He went to the gay synagogue a few times, but that felt more like a place for gay people who already felt connected to their faith, who were just looking to transplant it elsewhere; Jamie didn't fit in.
Then he met me. Jamie found a source of information about Judaism—in
me,
of all people.
He'd ask questions about holidays and I usually knew at least the short version of the answer. He'd ask about Israeli politics, a Yiddish word, a seemingly incomprehensible restriction on behavior, and more often than not, I knew what to say. I was the answer man.
I'll take Judaica for four hundred, Alex.
I helped him get in touch with his Jewishness. He helped me get back in touch with mine. And I liked that.
 
Jamie had to get up early for a flight to Mexico City, so I headed home around midnight. Michelle was waiting up for me in the living room.
She clicked off the television and ran over to give me a big hug.
“What's that for?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing,” she said, completely unconvincingly.
She hugged me again and a grin spread across her face like I'd never seen before. She was bouncing up and down on her the balls of her feet, taking both my hands in hers. She was wound up so tightly, it looked like she might twirl around the room like a top just to relieve the tension.
“What's
up
with you?” I asked.
“Notice anything different?” she asked. I dropped her hands and took a step back to examine her.
“Different? It's not your hair. It's not your clothes . . .”
“Keep guessing,” she said, slowly raising her hands in front of her face and wiggling her fingers until I noticed the diamond ring.
“Oh. My. God.”
“We're engaged!” she screamed, throwing her arms around my neck.
I hugged her back and squeezed her tight.
“When did Dan propose?”
“Tonight at dinner. I was totally surprised. He'd worked it all out with the waiter ahead of time, so when he brought dessert out, he gave me a plate with this ring on it. I was like, ‘What's going on?' And Dan said he wanted to marry me. And at first, I was like, am I on some kind of reality show? Have I just been Punk'd?”
Apparently, Dan had been considering popping the question for a few months; the trip to his parents' house for Thanksgiving was his way of seeing if his parents approved. And they did.
Somewhere in the back of my head, I knew that Michelle getting married was going to change my life in a profound way. We wouldn't be roommates anymore, wherever we'd both be living. I wouldn't get to see her every day. I hadn't spent so much as a week without her since we'd met; who could possibly take her place?
But I knew this was not the time to be thinking about my own impending loss, my own purely selfish concerns. Michelle was getting married—and to a pretty great guy. I was thrilled for her.
She started rattling off details about the wedding, all of them still tentative: “We might do it in June, or we might wait till next fall. . . . We'll do it in Philly, unless we can convince my parents to do it here. . . . We're thinking about a little ceremony, but then again, we have so many people we want to invite. . . .” Michelle was already talking in first-person plural.
“So I guess Dan's your
bashert
after all,” I said.
She must have seen a hint of dejection on my face.
“No, actually, I decided that you're wrong,” she said. “There isn't just one person for each of us. You
can
have more than one person you're destined to spend your life with. The same way your rabbi had his wife and Irene. I have two
basherts
: Dan and you.”
That was Michelle's way of telling me that she wasn't going to abandon me, that we'd always be together in some way, even if we didn't share a home. I should have known that all along.
 
During our freshman year at Maryland, Michelle and I split about nine hundred pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream—to relieve stress, alleviate boredom, celebrate handing in a paper, anything really. In a related vein, we started going to the school gym together to get rid of all that Chunky Monkey.
One afternoon, toward the end of our first semester—about a month after I'd come out to her and a few weeks into our intimately platonic friendship—we had really overdone it at the gym, taking an aerobics class that we had no business taking. “What does advanced aerobics mean?” Michelle had asked. “Like we can't take the fucking class until we have a master's degree?” We quickly learned that we were, in the world of aerobics, beginners.
Back in Michelle's dorm room, her back cramped up on her and I offered her a massage. An innocent massage.
She took off her T-shirt and lay facedown on her futon.
“This'd be easier without your bra,” I said.
I reached down to unhook it. She turned and looked up at me.
“You're sure you're gay?” she teased, slipping the straps over her arms.
“I'm sure now,” I teased back, tossing the bra aside.
There was nothing electric about the moment, but I felt an ease, a comfort with Michelle I had never experienced with anyone else.
I straddled her, in my gym shorts and tank top, and looked down at her body: smooth skin, narrow waist, soft shoulders. Ten thousand men on campus would have been ecstatic to be in my position.
I found the knot in Michelle's lower back and started gently kneading it. She sighed and relaxed into the futon.
We didn't even hear the key in the lock, as Michelle's straitlaced roommate, Kelly, opened the door. She gasped. Knocking me off her, Michelle shot up on the futon and covered her breasts with the pillow. I turned red. “I'm so sorry . . . I didn't realize . . .” Kelly said, backing out and closing the door behind her.
I started to giggle uncontrollably.
“What's so funny?” asked Michelle.
“She thinks she just walked in on something dirty,” I said. “It's just funny because she doesn't know that I'm gay.”
“No, it's even funnier,” said Michelle, “because she
does
know that you're gay.”
Apparently, while I'd been fretting over how to tell my roommate, my dormmates, my classmates, Michelle had been coming out for me. She'd already told most of the girls on her floor, who'd noticed how much time we spent together and had asked her what was up.
At first, I was peeved, but I quickly came to be grateful. Michelle gave me the push to come out by showing me that it wasn't such a big deal; for the most part, people didn't care one way or the other.
“But what happens if someone does care?” I asked her. “What if I tell someone and they're totally homophobic about it?”
“Then you tell them to go fuck themselves,” she said. “This isn't high school, Benji. You don't need to waste your time trying to accommodate assholes anymore. Live your life, be yourself, and don't worry about those people. They don't like you? Good riddance.”
I knew inside that she was right.
“And if they really hassle you, call me. I'll beat them up for you,” she said, flexing her biceps. “Why do you think I've been going to the gym?”
 
I still had people willing to stand up for me, as I realized the next week.
The first snow came early that winter. Notorious worrywarts about any forecast of accumulation, Washingtonians were sent into an absolute panic with the news of a storm blowing through the area in mid-December, even if the weathermen were only calling for one or two inches, tops. The shopping center was crowded with people stocking up on milk, bread, toilet paper, and DVDs, certain they'd otherwise be stranded for days without any food or commercial entertainment.
The main parking lot was full by lunchtime and people had started parking in the employee lot around back, near my office. I watched them, wound up with predictable anxiety, out my window, while I finished the newest ad for Paradise, promoting the bar's two-for-one shots of orange vodka with the headline “Be Fruitful and Multiply” over a photograph of a shirtless hunk holding an orange standing next to his exact double doing the exact same thing.
Flurries started to fall in the afternoon, capping the golden bells and fake poinsettias that hung from the light poles in the parking lot. But Irene—herself a Washingtonian for just two weeks by this point—was not going to let a few snowflakes change her routine.
“I haven't had a real winter in years,” she said, shaking the snow off her sleeves in my office. “Don't even have a proper winter coat anymore, not to mention boots.”

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