The Other Guy (11 page)

"Not that I'm complaining," Nate said some time later, his fingers idly climbing up and down the ridges of my collarbone as we lay in his bed, "but what brought this on?"

"Let me preface this story by saying that Chicago made me do it," I said.
I explained Chicago's insistence at getting into his room and at her ball, and finished the story by plucking the photos from his nightstand and handing them to Nate.
He smiled softly on receiving them and murmured, "Good dog."
"But seriously," I said, "I'm sorry about coming in here without your permission. I wasn't trying to snoop through your stuff or anything."
Nate dismissed the apology with a shake of his head and a light kiss to my shoulder. "I don't care, man; it's really not a big deal. Anyway, I'd say it worked out in both our favors, wouldn't you?"
"Pretty much, yeah," I agreed. I looked at the photos in his hand. "When did you take this one?"
He chuckled. "That was by accident. Remember I was showing that woman how to use my camera? She accidentally pressed the shutter release. It turned out a surprisingly good photo, though."
"Yeah, I don't look like a serial killer at all; it's weird."
"You're weird," he announced mildly, prodding a sleepy finger into the side of my face.
"And you're falling asleep," I said, sitting up and peeling the bedcovers away. "I'll leave you to it; you had a long night."
Nate's hand landed on my arm. "Wait, come here," he said, and raised himself up on one elbow to meet me halfway for a lingering kiss. A drowsy smile curved his lips as he pulled away and fell back onto the mattress. "Okay, now you can go away."
"Idiot," I said fondly, giving his shoulder a light shove, and tipped myself out of the bed.
Our clothes were in a haphazard mess on the floor, along with the scattered remnants of our friendship, and I picked my way through them carefully, pulling on my boxers and Tshirt on my way out the room.
After shutting the door quietly, I landed on the sofa again, grinning to myself and unable to stop.
Chicago sauntered past, the little rubber ball clamped loosely in one side of her mouth, and gave me a sideways, knowing look.
"Well played, dog," I said. "Well played."

Although I would have liked to stay forever, and Nate did his level best to keep me tethered to the bed with whispered entreaties that made my insides dissolve to liquid heat, I was due at my parents' for New Year's weekend, in lieu of my annual Christmas visit.

They had booked a cruise along the Floridian coast long ago with the understanding that Michelle and I would spend our first married Christmas together with her family. And just as I had refused to let my honeymoon go to waste, whether or not I had a wife to come with me, I'd refused to let my parents cancel their plans either.

Nate, come to see me off, wrapped his scarf around me, folding a deep red knot loosely at the hollow of my throat. "It's cold," he said, patting his handiwork. "And now you'll have something to remember me by."

"They live a two-hour drive away, and I'll be gone for a weekend."
"Hey, man, it's this or a lock of my hair."
I gave him an oblique glance. "You're weird," I said.
Nate grinned. "I know, and you're the one who likes me, so who really comes out on top here?" he said, echoing a similar, carefree sentiment I'd tossed at him way back in Thailand.
It felt like so long ago, a different life ago, and made our current relationship seem even more surreal.
"I can't believe you're using my own words against me."
"We can fight about it when you get back, and then make up in all kinds of super fun ways," Nate suggested, his voice dipping to a husky register I was starting to recognize as dangerous.
Falling right into it, I kissed him, and forgot to stop, and that was how I ended up at my parents' house an hour later than I had initially planned.
I parked in the driveway and dug my keys out of my bag to let myself in.
A wall of central heating enveloped me as soon as I stepped into the house, along with it the smell of old wood and the echoes of my childhood.
The house had been around for a long while, its bones and furnishings a tribute to the decade when my parents had first moved in with a chubby-fisted toddler in tow. There were a handful of newer things, too, a flat-screen TV, a sleeker dishwasher to replace the one that had died and leaked its remains all over the linoleum, but for the most part the house remained as I had grown up in it -- flowery pastels, dark wood furniture, geometrically patterned mirrors; it was practically a time capsule in itself.
Unbidden, a picture of me bringing Nate here flashed across my mind, Nate with his skinny jeans and artfully tousled hair and big city charm, and he looked as incongruous here as the flat-screen did, out of time and out of place.
But that hadn't stopped my parents insinuating the TV into their home either, so maybe he'd be dissonant but not unwelcome.
I shook my head of the thought, feeling absurd and oddly guilty that I was considering it at all. It hadn't been that long ago when I'd dragged Michelle here, nervous, unutterably nervous that the most important people in my life would discover that the only thing they had in common was being tied to me.
They had liked her well enough, Dad more than Mom, but civility wasn't the same as warmth.
It had occurred to me then that my only child status might have had something to do with it, the inability to cut the apron strings and all, or possibly because Michelle was staunchly Protestant, and they were naturally suspicious of anyone who swung that way. But then again, maybe they'd known something then that I didn't. People seemed to know a lot of things I didn't.
Setting my bag down and removing my coat along with Nate's scarf, I hooked them onto the coat rack by the door and called a hello to the house, ducking uneasily under the view of the crucifix hanging in the front hall. It was its occupant's job to weigh my worth, after all, and I tried to avoid his eye.
"Emory, honey, is that you?" Mom's voice floated from somewhere upstairs.
We found each other on the landing of the stairs and hugged; it was more or less perfunctory on my part, though at one point in my life, before sullen adolescence had hit, I'd known how to do it wholeheartedly. And now it had been so long since I'd been that boy that I wasn't sure I remembered how, though I sometimes wished I could.
Mom seemed not to mind, holding me for a second longer than usual, the light, floral scent of her favorite perfume as much of a memory marker as the house was, of skinned knees and comfort, of kisses goodnight. We hadn't seen each other since the wedding; ostensibly, this was to make up for any lack of hugging then, when I'd been so blunted that a hug and a punch might have felt identical.
"How was Christmas in Florida?" I asked, getting it in before she could ask, in not so many words, if my heart was still broken.
I wouldn't have known what to say anyway. Being with Nate was keeping the pieces together; that didn't necessarily mean it wasn't broken anymore.
Eventually, Dad appeared too, apparently experimenting with a salt-and-pepper beard now, obscuring the sharp chin and dimples I'd inherited, and we gathered in the living room to exchange the gifts meant to have been given several days ago and to sit through pictures of their trip, reminiscing about things I hadn't been a part of, people I hadn't talked to, places I'd never seen.
To make up for it, they let me talk about Thailand and prompted me to show them whatever photos I had on my laptop. Simply clicking through the entire contents of the pictures folder on my hard drive and doing the same dull spiel I'd done with Linn, I froze for a split second when the picture of me and Nate appeared.
"Oh," I said, "this was a guy I sort of made friends with down there, um, Nate. And funny enough, I ran into him again recently, out of the blue. Turns out he lives really close by, actually. So, uh, we've been hanging out a bit."
Mom nodded, smiling with a slight blankness at my rush of explanations.
"It gets me out of the house," I finished lamely.
Whether all that was me laying the brickwork for a future, more important conversation, or whether I was deliberately downplaying its significance to avoid the same such conversation, I couldn't tell.
Hurriedly, I clicked through the rest of the album, feeling my face burn. I hadn't lied, so why did it feel like I had?
When that was mercifully over, Dad and I whiled away the rest of the afternoon watching a football game on TV in his basement den, beers in our hands; it wasn't something we'd ever done regularly in years past, and it felt strange now, partaking of this quintessentially male-bonding activity when I couldn't feel further away.
I knew he wanted to ask about Michelle, ask how I was coping, ask where my life was now that it had derailed, but he wouldn't, at least not outright. We weren't the kind of family who talked about the things most important to us, so careful to keep our dirty laundry to ourselves that eventually nothing got aired at all.
And even if he did find the wherewithal to ask, I wouldn't be able to tell him everything. I would only say I was fine and leave it at that, because how do you even begin to tell your parents how you have failed, utterly, when not so long ago you had been so sure of yourself?
And how do you begin to tell your parents about something new springing up from the ruins, when the dust from the collapse hasn't even had a chance to fully settle?
So instead we watched the game, making the appropriate noises, drinking our beers, reaching out in our silence and getting silence in return.
We played our mutually unsatisfying game until Mom called us up to dinner.
Over chicken and potatoes, I learned of all the small town gossip I'd missed, living so far out of its sphere of influence. The dissolution of my almost-marriage had probably been going around the neighborhood for a while now, but Mom was careful not to mention what people thought of me now. It was all probably quite deliciously horrible.
Instead, I heard of Tanya from next door getting cheated by the used car salesman on her pickup truck, the row of houses going up with amazing alacrity a few streets away, and of Brian Carter, remember him, he was a senior when you were a sophomore, he was on the basketball team?
I said I vaguely recalled such a person, and Mom, satisfied enough, went on to inform me that he had recently adopted a baby.
"With another man," she said, in a near whisper, as though saying it too loudly might bring the authorities down on us.
"Oh," I said, absently poking at my potatoes. "Good for him."
She gave me a mildly censorious look. "Well, I don't know about that," she said, shaking a head of loose, graying curls. "It just doesn't seem right. I mean, what is the poor baby going to do without a mother?"
I put my fork down. "Hey, do you remember this girl I went to school with called Annie Hyland?" I tried to keep my tone conversational, but it narrowed to an edge anyway. "She was in my class in middle school. She got forcibly removed from her parents' care when she was thirteen, because her mom was on crack," I said, placing extra special emphasis on Mrs. Hyland's drug of choice.
"My goodness," Mom said, a hand to where her pearls would be if she had a string on; her fingers found a delicate gold cross instead. "And her father?"
"Her dad was a dealer," I said, bitterly relishing the look on my mother's face, with silent apologies to Annie Hyland for using her horrible childhood as a parable on stereotyping.
Last I heard, Annie was happily married and had gotten a cushy job as an instructor at an East Coast prep school, so I didn't feel too terrible about it in the end.
"Yeah, so," I continued with dogged blitheness, "I'm not really sure having the proper male-to-female ratio naturally constitutes good parenting."
"How come I don't remember hearing about this?" Mom said, totally missing the point. She touched my father's arm in concern. "Do you remember hearing about this?"
Dad shrugged, shook his head no.
"Oh, Emory," Mom said, "if we had known about all the drugs, we would've put you in a different school. We had no idea St. Innocent's was so poorly managed."
"Okay. Well, thanks, Mom," I said, sagging back into pushing my potatoes around.
Well, what had I expected? No one was going to change their minds about gay adoption just because a girl named Annie Hyland had crappy parents whose only great accomplishment in life had been to shove the appropriate body parts together and spit out a baby who would go on to beat the odds.
And how could I even consider the possibility of bringing up my personal stake in the issue now, when I knew where my parents stood?
I couldn't even find the means to talk to them about the girl who had stamped on my heart with her four-inch wedding heels; how was I supposed to talk about the guy who was helping me nurse it back to life?
The conversation went on without regard to my inner thoughts, winding to other people with other problems, and I did my best to be interested in them.
Mom showed me to the guest room in the basement after dinner, as my old bedroom upstairs, which had been slowly shedding my personality anyway ever since I had moved out, had been converted to a sewing room over the past year. It was a room I wouldn't have needed, because the guest room was the one with the bed big enough for two.
It was just as well, because the stairs going down didn't have the same creak in them as the ones that headed to the second floor, and nobody heard me creep to the front door in the middle of the night to retrieve Nate's scarf.
I fully recognized how bathetic it was, twining the scarf around my fist as I lay in bed, like a lovesick teenager, but it was the one familiar thing I had in a house that no longer belonged to me but to my memories alone.
And how much truer would that be in the years to come?
I thought of Nate and the half a lifetime of estrangement he and his parents insisted on perpetrating. I didn't know what his parents were like, save for that part. Maybe they were like mine, solid, hardworking, wanting the best they could wring out of life for their child, and sometimes just missing the mark.
And maybe my parents were just like them. How much did I want to find out?
At the moment, not at all. Being abandoned once this year had already been difficult enough; I didn't want to make it a habit.
Helpfully, nothing remotely related to the subject came up for the rest of my short stay, and if my parents noticed more distance from me than usual they said nothing about it, not that I would have even expected them to.
It wasn't a conscious move, my increased disengagement, though I suspected it had begun once the discussion on Brian Carter ended, like it would be easier to deal with if I was the one to choose to set myself apart from them, rather than the other way around. They couldn't reject me if I rejected them first.
Some part of me knew I was being petty and unreasonable, that this preemptive strike, however small, was borne almost entirely of self-induced anxiety. Like Linnea had said, I was asking myself too many what if questions and neglecting to recognize that just as everything might go wrong, there was an equal chance that it would all turn out perfectly fine.
I wasn't giving my parents a chance to show me what they were capable of because I knew they were capable of so much. I just didn't know what they would do with it once I asked it of them, and I hadn't the courage to ask.
What if they didn't choose me?
Driving home the following day with this imbroglio building and seething within me, I ended up outside Nate's apartment instead of mine. I sat in the car for a while, the engine idling, staring out the window to his building across the street, its mute facade refusing to relinquish the answers I needed.
My umbrage took a detour, focusing its sights on Nate.
Who was he to come into my life and turn it so far upside down that gravity didn't even know which way to work anymore?
Who was he to make me question the entirety of how I had lived my life before him?
The accusations piled on until I snapped the ignition off and marched across the street and up to the second story of his building, knocking urgently on his door, not even knowing if he was in.
The door opened, exuding warm yellow light from within. "Hey," Nate said, a smile on his lips. "You're home."
Who was he to make me think that this might all be worth it?
"I am," I said.
I kissed him fiercely then, pinning him to the wall, undoing his belt, in an act of defiance my parents would never see.