The Men from the Boys (35 page)

“So,” I say now, “how'd it go with your parents?”

“Okay.” He's not looking at me. He's looking around the apartment, as if he were trying to remember what was where, trying to piece it all together in his head.

“Did they freak—?”

He turns to face me. “I heard you went for a walk with Eddie.”

“What?”

“A walk. After I left. You asked him to go for a walk with you.”

“I just—I mean, we were both headed the same way....”

“Jeff, I know about last summer.”

“Well,” I say. “I would hope so.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just that I hope Eduardo was up-front about our relationship.”

Tommy's face is hard. “You didn't have a relationship.”

“I'm afraid I disagree.”

“You didn't seem to think so at the time.”

I'm getting angry. “What's he been telling you?”

“Never mind. He's told me enough. He's told me how you fucked him without a condom.”

Sudden anger tightens my lips. “Look, don't put your shit on me. I want to try and support you through this, Tommy, but my emotions are a little raw themselves.”

He walks off toward the kitchen, his footsteps echoing across the bare hardwood floors.

“I also know that Eduardo turned out negative,” I call after him. “So you can't—”

He turns back to me. “I can do anything I want.”

We look at each other. “Why did you come here, Tommy?”

He narrows his eyes at me. “When Eddie told me that you went for that walk, I knew I had to come over. I knew I had to see you before you left to tell you that I won't stand for it. You've always gotten everything you want, Jeff. Well, not this time.”

I laugh. Everything I want! “You don't know anything, Tommy.”

“I know that you cared more about scoring with a guy than any sense of friendship for me. How many guys—?”

“I'm sorry. I know there have been times when I was a shit. I'm sorry. I've apologized to you before, and I'll do so again if you want. But can't we move on?”

He looks at me, and the depth of his hatred is clear. It hits me: he's never liked me. He's been waiting for this very moment the entire time we've known each other. He's probably even rehearsed it in his therapy, or at least in front of his mirror. He's hated me through it all—through the rallies, through the marches, through the bar-hopping, on the steps of Spiritus, here on this couch telling me he had feelings for Lloyd.

“Tommy,” I say. “Why did you stick around? If I was so rotten, why did you stay my friend?”

“Because I wanted to be like you. I wanted to have the guys you got. I wanted a home like you had, a lover like you had, a body like you had.”

His use of the past tense doesn't go unnoticed. But it's not what I respond to. “Tommy,” I tell him, “did you ever think I might have envied
you
?”

He laughs.

“I did. You were the one people followed. You were the leader. You were the one who had the political insights, the courage—”

“Cut the crap, Jeff. I won't let you take Eddie from me. Not this time.”

It's on the tip of my tongue to say, “
You
took Eduardo from me and
turned
him into Eddie,” but I don't. Because it's not true. Because I can't believe that Eduardo doesn't still have
something
in his heart for me, no matter how much hostility he feels.

It's as if Tommy can read my mind. “Did you think Eddie could never love me because I'm not good-looking enough? Not one of the beautiful boys?”

“No, no, not at all—and, Tommy, you're not—”

“Bullshit. That's why you approached him. Oh, it should be easy to get him back, you must have thought. He's just with Tommy.”

“That's not true. I didn't think that. I know Eduardo cares about you.” My voice goes husky. “And I guess I just have to accept that.”

He's quiet. His face seems to brighten. “You
were
in love with him, weren't you?”

I face the truth. “More than he knows. More than I knew.”

We're both quiet now. Tommy has had his victory. His little visit has gone even better than he planned. Not only did he assert himself, but he discovered how weak I really was. “Satisfied?” I ask finally.

“I feel sorry for you, Jeff,” he says, walking toward the door.

“I'm sure that gives you a great deal of pleasure.”

He ignores me. “But I feel worse for Lloyd. Here he is, all guilt-ridden about leaving you, while you sit here pining over someone else. Doesn't seem fair, does it?”

For a long time after he leaves I just stand there. His words hang in the air, as the humidity does on the Cape in those horrible days in the middle of August. The room feels stuffy and warm. I think for a moment of the little ritual of sage Lloyd and I performed, and wonder if Tommy's energy ruined all that. Or if the sage is powerful enough to repel whatever he left behind.

The phone rings, startling me. It rings from nowhere, from everywhere, bouncing off the bare walls and skipping across the floor. There's one phone still hooked up, a big old black model that came with the place and for nearly six years has sat under a layer of dust beneath our bed. I rehooked it last night, setting it on the kitchen counter, in case Lloyd called to see how I was. He didn't. It rings sharply now, almost cutting me with its sound, and it takes me several seconds to think clearly enough to turn my feet around and answer it.

“Lloyd?” I say.

“Jeffy? It's Mom.”

“Mom?”

“Thought you should know. It's your brother.”

“Kevin?”

“We're all a wreck here. He's done something very foolish.”

“He's gone and left Danielle. And the kids. Jesus Christ.” Her voice rasps a bit. I can tell she's pulled away from the phone to take a drag off her cigarette. “Can't believe I'm even saying this. He's left her for a younger woman.
Twenty-four
years old, for God's sake!”

“We're just broken up about this. Poor Danielle's here crying her eyes out. Nobody even knows where he is. It's like he just cracked up or something. Left a note for Danielle to find yesterday after she and the kids got back from the mall. Jesus, this girl he took off with used to baby-sit for the kids! I can't
imagine
what got into him.”

Neither can I. Kevin—the perfect son, always in control. “Mom, can I call you back?” I ask. “I'm moving today and need to get going.”

“Oh. That's right. Well, good luck. We'll keep you posted.”

“Mom, are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She sighs. “Just don't
you
go do anything foolish now, too, you hear?”

“Okay, Mom.”

I hang up the phone. I even disconnect it. I walk over to my pile and carry my things one by one to the car. When I'm all finished, I come back inside and switch off the light. I don't even turn around for one last look before I close the door and lock it behind me forever.

It's time to get the hell on the road.

Provincetown, September 1994

He came back because he loves me. Sitting here on the breakwater, the steady whipping wind a sure sign of the encroaching fall, I watch Eduardo's eyes as they move across the waves, up to the brilliant blue of the sky, avoiding my gaze with a self-conscious fear.

“I'm glad you came down this weekend,” I say at last.

“I had to get the rest of my stuff.”

That's his rationale, but he came because of me. I know that. He left last Monday, started school on Tuesday. We saw each other briefly the morning after our fight. It was stiff but cordial. “Good luck,” I told him. “Call me.”

He didn't need to. I called him. That night, late, as he settled into his new apartment in Somerville with his straight friend Sandy. The phone woke him, and he was thrilled I called.

“I was missing you,” he admitted.

“And me you,” I told him.

We were like two high-school sweethearts sneaking a phone call in the middle of the night, our hearts aching for one another with the kind of ardor peculiar to teenagers, desperate and sweet and oh so horribly real. “I'm coming back on Saturday,” he told me then. “Maybe we can get together.”

So we have. One last time under the Provincetown sun.

“We'll see each other in Boston,” I tell him now.

He just smiles, as if I'm handing him a line. Maybe I am. It's hard to tell sometimes when it concerns Eduardo. Sometimes I don't know if I'm protecting his feelings or my own.

We walked across the breakers to Long Point. It's something we'd wanted to do all summer but never did. Eduardo used to come out here with his father to catch littlenecks. “Baskets and baskets we'd haul back,” he remembered, but today he doesn't want to talk about his father or sea creatures. He has only one thing on his mind.

“Jeff, I came back because I wanted to talk with you.”

“So talk.”

The wind whips his hair. Across the bay the whitewashed, weather-worn shops huddle as if for a storm. The clock tower on top of the town hall stands apart, dwarfed only by the majestic Pilgrim Memorial impaling the cloudless sky.

“I just don't know where we're going,” he says.

“What do you mean, ‘where we're going'?”

This seems to anger him all over again, as if my very question bespeaks my offense.

“You just don't get it, Jeff.”

“What don't I get?” I take his hand. It's cold, hard. “Eduardo, I'm
trying
to understand. I just can't go on with you getting angry at me all the time.”

“Then don't.”

“Eduardo, next week we close up this place. Then I'm back in Boston. We'll be together.”

“When Lloyd's away.”

I look at him, exasperated. “You wish I wasn't with Lloyd.”

“That's not true.”

“Then I don't understand all the rage toward me buried in there.” I tap his chest.

He pulls away, standing up, taking a few steps away from me. He stands on a rock looking out over the marshy side of the breakwater, where the Cape thins to its slenderest stretch, a fragile whiff of sand holding firm against the fury of the Atlantic.

“Maybe I do have a lot of rage for you,” he concedes. “Maybe I do.”

“Eduardo, if this isn't enough for you—” I say, coming up behind him. But I know this isn't the response he wants. He wants me to be angry, as angry as he is—angry that we're being separated, that our summer is over.

“It
isn't
enough, Jeff. Maybe being second should be okay. Maybe in how you see the world second is as good as first and sometimes even better. You go ahead and define ‘second' all you want to, Jeff, but just you try it sometime.
Try
being second.”

“Then end the relationship, Eduardo,” I tell him. “If it's so unsatisfactory, end it. I'll just have to accept that.”

“Is that all you have to say?” He turns and looks at me. His big brown eyes reflect the sun. “You'd have to accept it?”

“What more do you want me to say?”

That's it, I realize, even as I articulate the words. That little question just pushed him over. I
know
what more he wants me to say. And I
could
say it, too-I could tell him everything he wants to hear. It's been bottled up inside me for so long, but I can't let it out. I can't say it. Why doesn't he understand that?

He's crying now, long, soundless tears that fall down his angular face. I'm struck again by how beautiful he is. The quivering of his jaw breaks my heart. I reach over to console him, to take him into my arms, but he pushes me away forcefully. Defiantly.

I start to say something, something that might get us over this, bring him back, start the ride all over again—but he turns. Turns and runs, just as the wind swirls in rage unleashed. His hair catches in the gale, flying out from his head, his untucked flannel shirt flapping as he runs. I do not follow. I stand and watch him go as the sun sinks over the water, the only place on the East Coast where the sun sets over the ocean. His face is pained, his jaw set in resistance. He bounds across the breakwater with surprising ease. Of course. He's been doing it since he was a boy.

I do not start back until the sky is dark and the stars are out. I look for it, and of course it's there: the big, bright, beautiful four-pointed star, the one Eduardo saw the first night we met, the star in the shape of the necklace lost forever in the sand.

He was right, I say to myself. That's no helicopter.

It's a
star.

AGE

Provincetown, April 1995

My first full day in Provincetown, a freak April snowstorm hits. I've never seen snow on Commercial Street before. It's quite the sight. Javitz, Ernie, and I are making our way through town, faces averted from the furious rush of wind and snow. The steps of Spiritus are blanketed in white, the pizza shop closed tight for the winter. Summer seems far, far away. Shingles hawking bikes and ice cream swing dispiritedly in the wind. We pass by the entrance to tea dance, where a warped, hand-lettered cardboard sign covers the locked fence door: “See You Memorial Day.”

We're the only ones, so far, on the street. “Get me back to civilization!” I cry.

“Girl,” Ernie scolds, “civilization is
vastly
overrated.”