From Whence You Came, and Why it Matters
There was no fire in the fireplace. That didn’t seem right to me. The sitting room was in the oldest part of the house. I always made sure we had a big fire going in the cavernous fireplace to keep the chill from creeping in through the ancient stonework.
I went into the room to build a fire right away. I didn’t want Walt to catch a chill while he was still recovering from his heart attack. As I made it around to the other side of his chair, I saw it was empty except for the blanket folded on the seat. The newspaper was on a nearby table.
I muttered my frustration to the room. “Damn that man. Every time I look away, he’s off doing something.” I suspected he’d gone to get wood to build his own fire. I didn’t want him to strain himself, so I went to find him. I checked the porch where the wood box was, but he wasn’t there.
To my surprise, it was a beautiful day. The weather was crisp springtime. The trees were starting to bud and easter flowers were in bloom in the flowerbeds. Church bells jangled over the landscape. The barely discernable pattern of the bells told me they rang from the nearby Episcopal church. The Episcopalians followed the Anglican tradition of change ringing their bells for special occasions. I’d heard the tuneless sound referred to by some as ‘music.’ It didn’t sound like any music I’d ever heard, but I hadn’t been raised in their tradition. Their sound was a warning because if the bells were ringing, I belonged in church.
I wondered if I had time to change my clothes and get there before the service started. I looked down to see that I was already dressed in a somber black suit. My right hand ached. It held the base of a simple bouquet of white flowers. Since I was ready to go, I hurried along.
I made good time on my walk. Before I even realized I’d made the trip, I arrived in front of the modest brick church with its disproportionately tall, white clapboard bell tower. The bells ceased and the front doors opened. People in black mourning clothes poured from the doors and down the steps. The few who looked my way did so with sour expressions. I wondered what I’d done to make them angry.
I waited with my flowers until the priest came down the walk. He moved slowly with the careful steps of a man of great age. I was surprised to see him. As far as I knew, the old priest was long retired. He was in his middle-nineties after all. The mass must have been very important for him to come out of retirement. I was sorry I missed it. I stepped onto the path to apologize to the old man.
He shook his grey head and spoke with the thin, quavering voice of a man whose life can be counted in days and weeks instead of in months and years. “Not to me! Do not say you’re sorry to me. You owe your apology to another.” The ancient priest raised a skeletal finger and pointed toward the churchyard.
I followed the bent finger with my eyes and saw Charlie’s grave under the oak tree. Since I’d missed the service, I would visit my friend. He would surely like to have the flowers I brought. I crossed the lawn into the churchyard and moved carefully among the stones. The graves were old and some of the headstones were at odd angles. I was always very careful because I was nervous of falling.
As I drew near Charlie’s headstone, I noticed another grave which had been built very near to it. The freshly turned earth confused me. When Walt and I paid to have Charlie moved from the potter’s field, we also bought the plots next to his for ourselves. The spot was so pretty, and we thought he should have some company. There shouldn’t have been a fresh grave in that spot, not until either Walt or I were ready to be interred into it.
I struggled over the uneven ground to see if there was a name on the grave, but it was so fresh, the monument had yet to be placed. There was only a wooden stake at the head with some words painted on it. I knelt in the dirt to bring my old eyes close enough to read the letters. I noticed a string tied to the stake. A plain gold wedding band dangled at the end of it.
I pulled the band from the string and held it in my left palm. It looked like mine. I tried to compare the two but found my ring missing. Fear wrapped its icy fingers around my heart. I bent to squint directly at the wooden stake. The words weren’t just a name. There was also a sentence painted. The stake read, ‘here lies Walter Whitman Stack. Law left when Walt needed him the most.’
I screamed.
* * * *
Strong hands shook me awake. I opened my eyes to peer into a scared bright blue gaze. “Law!”
“What the fuck?”
“Law, it’s Larry.”
“Larry?” I blinked hard and remembered where I was. “Help me out of this fucking chair.”
He pulled me to my feet and waited to make sure I was steady. I blinked some more to clear the sleep film from my eyes. As it cleared, I saw Larry was naked and his cock was hard from having just woken up. “Jesus, would you put some goddamned pants on?”
I jerked my arm from his steadying grasp and staggered through the bedroom door. I picked my careful way down the stairs. My body was stiff and painful from having spent the night in the chair. When I finally made it for the ground floor, I stalked to the back of the house, into the small kitchen. I needed coffee, badly. Flashes of memory from the previous night came to me like poltergeists. I couldn’t hope to organize them until I’d had coffee.
I snatched cabinets open one after the other in search of the percolator. I found a can of coffee, but no way to combine it with water into a drinkable brew. I was nearly ready to fill my lip with coffee grounds like some people dip snuff when Larry entered.
He came on his bare feet. He wore nothing more than the black slacks and suspenders he’d had on the night before. He saw my desperate situation and set to work. He opened a lower cabinet and retrieved a glass siphon coffee maker. He wordlessly measured coffee and water into the apparatus and put it on the stove. Once he had a low flame lit under the glass bowl, he turned to lean against the counter to talk. “I suppose we should chat.”
I snarled at him. “You’re goddamned right. What the fuck did you and Stephan give me? I can’t believe what I participated in last night. I didn’t even hardly do anything, but I’m mortified over what I did do. Is that what reefer does to people?”
He pushed himself off the counter and wrapped his strong arms around my body. “Free love, Law. We didn’t do anything to be ashamed of. Even if you had done much more, there’d still be no reason for shame.”
Larry’s flesh felt hot. He smelled sweaty and musky, like sex. His scent and his strength stirred my desire. Even my elderly, arthritic body craved Larry’s young and strong one. I brought my hands up between us and pushed him away. “NO! NO MORE OF THAT!” I stalked away from the young man and propped myself in a kitchen chair. “Free love my ass! You stay the fuck over there. I’ll be here, and you be there, and no more touchy-feely bullshit. ENOUGH!”
He opened his mouth to argue but closed it again without a word. He went back to lean on the counter in silence. I sat in my chair and rubbed my face savagely. I felt dirty, both physically and emotionally. My body was sticky with sweat from sleeping in my clothes. My soul felt like it wore a fresh stain of corruption for allowing myself to participate in sexual escapades with men half my age. I felt especially stained because one of those men was the son of a good friend, a boy who was named after me.
Larry and I waited in uneasy silence while the water rose from the lower bowl of the coffee brewer into the upper. He flipped an hourglass egg timer over and watched it until the sand ran out. He took the brewer from the flame and set it on a towel. The water, which was now coffee, was pulled back into the lower bowl. He set the upper bowl on a stand and poured two cups from the lower.
“Cream and sugar?” He asked carefully, like he was afraid of setting me off again.
“Black.”
He set a cup in front of me and took his own to the opposite side of the table. He started to sit down, but he stopped. “Is this too close?”
“You may sit there.”
Larry sat. I took my cup from the table and drank from it. The coffee was boiling hot. It burned my mouth and my throat. The pain brought a tear to my eye, but it woke me the rest of the way. I wrapped my hands around the scalding cup for the heat to soothe my joints.
Larry blew on his coffee and set it down to cool. “Can’t you even look at me?”
His question made me want to rub my face again, but I didn’t want to put my coffee down. Instead, I shuffled around on my chair to face him. “Why are you dressed like that?”
He looked down at himself like he needed to see how he was dressed before he could answer. “It’s just a habit. When I was growing up, we all used to dress like this in the hot weather. The long pants protect your legs from brambles, but going without a shirt keeps you cool. Why? Does it make you uncomfortable?”
“It reminds me of your father.”
“That’s good, right?”
Instead of answering his question, I asked him another one. “How much did your dad tell you about the old days, when he and I met?”
He recounted the well-worn story. He told about when his father had been thrown off the farm and hitch-hiked to Philadelphia. He told about how David got a job at Mitch’s Kingdom of Keystone. He reminded me about David’s beating at the hands of the decency crusaders and finally about my gift of money and a train ticket. He had the facts of the story, but not the spirit. It was time he knew what really happened and why. Only with the true history, could I premise why I was so upset about what I’d participated in with him and Stephan.
I stood from my seat and took off my jacket. I draped it over the back of my chair and started to unbutton my shirt. “Are you squeamish?”
He shook his head, so I finished unclasping the buttons. The work made my hands hurt, but there was very little that didn’t hurt my hands anymore. When I reached the bottom, I pulled my shirttails from my pants and revealed my scars from the war. To Larry’s credit, he didn’t gasp, nor did he look away.
“Your dad never understood why I gave him money and sent him away. The reason is the scars that I wear. When I was in the war, I had a friend. My friend wasn’t anything like your dad. They didn’t look alike. They didn’t act alike. The only thing they had in common was they were in a place they didn’t belong. Your dad didn’t belong in this city just like my friend Peter, didn’t belong in a war. I tried to protect Peter, but the war was too big for me to shield him from all of it. He and I were facing each other when a shell exploded behind him. He was literally destroyed. These scars are from the shrapnel of his body. As the shell disintegrated Peter, it pushed the fragments of his skeleton into the soft tissue of my flesh.”
Larry was stunned that such a thing was even possible. I was living proof that it was. “What does that have to do with my dad?”
I was finished with show and tell. I tried to button my shirt, but the joints of my right hand locked up and refused to work. I wrapped the shirt around my body and sat to have my coffee. The cup had cooled by then, so I drank it down in a few gulps. Larry got up to empty the dregs of the pot into my cup and make more. While he did, I told the next part of my tale.
“You and your dad both call me a hero. You’re both wrong. In 1929, I was a fucking monster. I worked as a detective on the police force, but police work back then wasn’t like police work today. A lot of the guys I worked with were monsters.”
He finished setting up the fancy glass brewer and leaned on the counter to listen. He made a single comment. “I don’t believe you were ever a monster. You couldn’t have been.”
“When we met, I was fifty-three years old. I’d been Walt’s partner for nine years and his husband for six. I was a very different person in 1953 than I was in my youth.”
I gave an example to prove my point. “In 1927, me and another detective caught up with a violent rapist. The guy was a serial offender. He’d catch a woman, rape her in an alley, and carve up her face so she’d always have to wear his mark to show what he’d done. I watched the guy while my partner went to a call box to ring the station. He reported the capture and asked for a wagon to come pick us up. Instead of the wagon, the captain of the squad showed up. Captain Marshall, who is long dead now, loved women. To him, anyone who raped and brutalized a woman should pay. He had me remove the handcuffs from the rapist, then me and my partner watched while Marshall beat him to death.
“The monster I was back then didn’t mind at all. My only objection was the length of time it took. My shift was officially over, and I didn’t want to waste the thirty minutes. I smoked a cigar to kill the time while Marshall murdered the man. I watched what he did without feeling. That’s who I was back then, a fucking wild animal. I was never a murderer, not exactly, but I had taken my fair share of lives. I was also a crooked cop who accepted bribes from bootleggers and whorehouse operators. I wore my queerness like a badge and dared anyone to take issue with it. If they did, I beat them, savagely.
“I never lost a fight. That wasn’t because I was the best fighter ever. It was because the fight wasn’t over until I won. Sometimes I would get beaten, but I never laid down. Even if I had to go away and lick my wounds for a few days, or even a few months, eventually I would find the person and I would win.”
Larry heard the coffee maker bubble from the stovetop. The water from the bottom bowl had been forced to the top. He flipped the egg timer again and brought his attention back to my story. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you need to understand. Your father and you both look at me like I’m some guardian angel. The man I was then, was nobody’s angel. Old Madam Mitch used to call me The Hero of Law and Order. I was nobody’s hero. I was a demon with a gun and a badge instead of a pitchfork. I worked, and I collected my graft, and I rolled in the flesh at Madam Mitchell’s Kingdom of Keystone.”
I laughed bitterly. “Your old man told you stories like the Kingdom was a magical place. I guess it was, but not in a kid’s story kind of way. It was a place of depravity and sex, liquor and gambling, and all the other pleasures of the flesh. In 1929, I walked into the bar at Mitch’s and there was your dad behind the bar. If there’s an angel anywhere in this story, it’s him. He was dressed just like you are now, except his suspenders were plaid. Those leather ones he wears now, I bought those for him.”
Larry gripped the counter at his back like he needed to hold onto it to brace himself against my story. “You bought the leather suspenders? Dad loves those.”
“I bought them because your father took my breath away. He was the only innocent in that whole goddamned place. There he was, an eighteen-year-old kid right off the farm in Iowa. He was like a…” I hesitated until the memory of the way I’d thought of David popped into my head, “he was like a cornflower trying to survive in a festering garbage heap.”
I looked down at my hands and remembered how they used to shake when they got near David. “I never even considered touching him. I never shook his hand or clapped him on the shoulder. I knew what I was, and I knew what your dad was. I knew I was a monster, an animal who was filled with hate for the world that rejected him; nothing but a malignant mass of anger.
“Your dad didn’t hate. I don’t think he knew how. Even after your grandfather tossed him away, he didn’t harden his heart. He was sad. The first night he and I met, we talked until the sun came up. He told me his story. Through the whole thing, not one word of anger passed over his lips. I still don’t understand how he could have been so hurt but not feel any hate.”
I shook my head and shrugged. “What my father did to me taught me to hate. He disowned me like your grandfather disowned your father. As for your dad, I don’t think he took any lesson from the experience. It was just something that happened, like an auto accident or a lightning strike. He seemed to see no deeper meaning in it. I wish I understood why. I wish I could make sense of the difference between him and me. I want to know why I became an animal and why he remained an innocent.”
I stared at my hands some more and thought of the past and the bottomless hate I had for the whole world. “Why?” I asked myself like I had a thousand times before. I had no answer to that question. I never had and likely never would. I wondered if God would tell me when I was dead.
Larry interrupted my musing with a whispered question. “You and dad…you never…?”
“Not back then. I was afraid to touch him. I was afraid my…my evil would stain your father’s purity. In my imagination, if I ever touched him, it would be like a coal miner wiping his hands on a clean white sheet. I worshipped your father’s innocence and his beauty. I bought the suspenders for him, not as a gift for a person, more like an offering to lay upon the altar I’d built for him. Not a real structure, but a mental wall I erected between him and me, my black evil on one side, his bright purity on the other.”
The coffee maker bubbled angrily. The glass rattled against itself. Larry grabbed it from the burner and set it on the towel to cool. He leaned over the upper bowl to sniff the contents. “It’s gone sour from brewing too long. I’ll make another pot.”
I held my mug up. “I’ll take it.” He tried to refuse, but I refused his refusal. “Shake some salt in it and serve it up. Salt cuts the bitterness. I don’t want to wait for you to fiddle with that fancy brewer again. I need coffee so bad, I’m half-tempted to tell you to skip the mug and pour it right down my throat.”
He did as I said and filled both our cups again. He sat at the table and waited for me to finish my story. “When your dad got beat up, I sent him away. Every time I looked at him after he was beaten and hurt, all I could see was my friend Peter who died in the war. The city was a kind of a war. Your dad didn’t belong in it any more than Peter belonged in a trench in France. I had a big pile of money set aside from the graft I took. I gave your dad some and put him on his train. At the last moment, he asked me to go with him.”
“He what?”
“He hugged me, like you did here this morning, and he invited me into his life. The angel wrapped his arms around the demon and invited him to Montana. I almost stepped onto the train.” I made certain I had Larry’s attention for the next thing I wanted to say. “Just imagine, if I had, you wouldn’t be here. In that moment, every fiber of my being cried out and told me to join your dad, become a farmer, and leave the evil of the city behind.”
I sucked a breath and blew it out. With it, I exhaled the steam and coal smoke I inhaled on that long ago day. “I didn’t go. I stayed here where I belonged because I knew I couldn’t leave the evil behind. I knew I’d take it with me. I knew the hatred would fester until I destroyed your father’s innocence and everything good inside of him. I stayed here, and for good measure, I hunted the men who hurt your dad, and I hurt them back. I did it because that’s what the animal inside me said they deserved.
“In 1929 I put your father on a train. I gave him money to buy his dream. He made a lot of noise about paying me back, with interest. I didn’t care. The money meant nothing to me…nothing. I had over twenty-thousand in a safe-deposit box. I offered him all of it if he would leave. The five that he accepted, I just about had to force into his hand. I put your father on his train at the Broad Street Station. The fucking station isn’t even there anymore. It’s all gone. The past is funny that way. The man I was, the things I did, even the buildings where I did them, all gone. I didn’t hear a word from your dad until 1953 when you got in trouble. By then I was a different man. That’s why I could touch him, then. That’s why I could be who he needed me to be so I could help you.”
I took a breath and a sip of my coffee. It was awful, but it was coffee. I drank the mug down quickly. Once it hit bottom, I started to feel human again. “And, that’s why I feel terrible about last night. You’re the son of a good man I respect. Your dad named you after me because he thought I was a good man. Part of the reason that you exist is because of the choices I made. That doesn’t make you my son, but I feel fatherly toward you. What we did last night was wrong, and whether it was under the influence of drugs or not, it makes me feel dirty.”
Larry sipped his coffee and made a face. He was disgusted by the flavor. He got up to fix a fresh pot and to explain how he saw things. “Stephan and me don’t look at sex like you do. We have a lot of it, and not just with each other. We believe in free love. We also smoke a lot of grass. He and I are used to it. I forgot how hard it hits people who haven’t had it before.
“In the theater, a lot of guys are gay. Even the straight ones like to experiment. We host big parties with food and drinks and lots of grass and sex. We have all kinds of guys over. Last night you kept saying about how old you are. Steph and I have had guys your age. We’ve had older ones too. I like fucking. I like seeing Stephan take dick from other guys. I like hanging out with him while he does it. We kiss and shotgun weed smoke back and forth while the guys line up to plow his hole. He gets off on getting used. The ‘I’m just a hole’ thing was his idea. I play along because he likes it. I like it too. It makes me hot to pretend I’m using him.
“I usually top. I’ll fuck a bottom right next to him. Sometimes, me and the another top will take turns. Stephan likes watching me fuck. He likes taking my dick after I’ve been fucking someone else. For his last birthday, he wanted to take two cocks at the same time. I sat on the settee downstairs and he sat facing me with my cock inside him. A bunch of guys lined up behind. We held each other and kissed while the others stuffed his hole. It felt great for both of us. It was also super intimate. All Stephan could see was me and all I could see was him. It was like we were all alone; just me and him and a ton of pleasure.”
“And a dozen anonymous cocks.” I said to interrupt what had started to sound like bragging. “How did you feel afterwards?”
Larry smirked. “Sore. My dick was raw…”
Larry’s flippancy about a very serious subject pissed me off. I snarled at him over the final words of his explanation. “That’s not what I fucking meant!” I strangled my rage and tried to talk like a human being. “Look, I get it. Back when I was spending a lot of time at Mitch’s Kingdom, I did stuff like that. You kids today think you invented free love. The concept has been around a lot longer than you’ve been alive. Sex is fun. It feels good. I used to love how nasty I felt after an orgy. I enjoyed not knowing the men I had sex with. The mystery added to the fun. Madam Mitch used to host orgies that went on for days. She’d give over the entire second floor of her mansion to them. Men would rotate in and out all the time. The whole place would reek of sweat and men. I LOVED it.”
Larry beamed. “I knew you were like us. Stephan said you were too old to have ever been cool. I can’t wait to tell him he was wrong.”
“But, so what? No matter how much sex I had, I was still me. I was still the hate-filled animal. None of those orgies made me a better man. The other thing you have to realize is, the twenties were wide open, kind of like today. The queers were showing off, just like they are now. When the crash came, all that stopped. People pretended to have morals again. It could stop again, just like that.” I tried to snap my fingers in the air. My fingers wouldn’t snap, so I skipped the visual aid. “I remember some queer stage and film actors who lived in the open during the twenties. When the thirties came, their careers were over. Some took their own lives.”
Larry glared from his place against the counter. “What’s your point? Are you saying I should hide what I am because the straights can’t handle it?”
“I would never say that. I don’t want to moralize to you, or pass judgement. I just don’t want to see you get hurt. Don’t you ever think of your future? How old are you, anyway?”
“Thirty-three.”
“You’re not a kid anymore. The older you get, the harder it is to maintain the pace. At some point, you’ll be too old for the lifestyle. In your twenties, it’s great. Now that you’re in your thirties, you might want to think about what’s next. It can’t be sex and drugs forever. I learned that when Mitch’s shut down. When the orgies ended, I kept trying to follow that path. I never planned for the future. I never even thought about anything beyond the next time I could find something warm to lay down with. Walt changed that for me. He gave me a future to look forward to. For the first bunch of years that he and I were together, the only future I cared about was his. It took me a while to figure out I could have dreams too.”
He didn’t see the point of my speech. “So, it’s monogamy or nothing?”
“I’m trying to explain that wallowing in flesh only lasts for so long. Eventually the flesh gets old. When that happens, it’s great to have someone to care for and a life to lead that isn’t just based on fun. Fun is great, but it’s only one part of life. I’ve had a lot of fun, both before and after I married Walt. I also helped to build a life. I helped run a restaurant. I help people.”
He wanted to know more. “What people?”
“I’ve paid for six draft dodgers to go to Canada. I helped a good man stop drinking himself to death. I kept a friend from the old days from being buried in a pauper’s grave. I’ve been able to do those things because of the life that I built with Walt. I never would have been able to do any of that if I would have stuck to my old way of living.”
“I never thought of that.”
“The other thing is, what you and Stephan are, what me and Walt are, is still illegal in this state. All it would take would be for one person from one of your sex parties to regret what they did and blame you. What happened to me last night could easily happen to someone else. What if that person went to the police? The vice boys would lap it up. Drugs and queer sex, theater people, a grand house with a big mural of flesh on the wall, decadence and depravity. They’d put you in jail and nothing would get you out.
“The stuff I did at Mitch’s, I did at Mitch’s. It was her worry if things went bad, not mine. You own this house. You host these parties. That makes you responsible. The cops don’t go out of their way to bust fags like they used to, but they still remember how. Don’t set yourself up to be some vice squad lieutenant’s promotion to captain. I wish you didn’t have to worry about those things, but that’s the way it is. Don’t let it happen to you. You and Stephan are great together. You’re both great. You welcomed me. You held me when I badly needed to be held. You made me feel better. Everything would have been fine if Stephan would have kept that fucking joint to himself.”
As if conjured by my words, Stephan breezed into the room. Instead of his regular, sheer and flowing attire, he wore a flannel pajama top and white brief underwear. “I am sorry about that, Granddaddy.” He said as he kissed Larry and took a seat at the table. “I am rather embarrassed at the exhibition we made of ourselves last night. I hope you can forgive us for getting carried away.”
Larry was taken aback over his partner’s apology. “Since when are you embarrassed over anything? I thought sex was just sex.”
Stephan pointed at the coffee brewer which was about to boil over again. Larry took it from the flame and moved it to the towel to let it cool. Stephan waited for Larry’s attention and then waved an impatient hand at me.
“Granddaddy is family. Doing what we did in front of him isn’t very different than if we did it in front of your father. I’m extremely permissive, but there are limits. That grass we smoked last night was some of the strongest stuff I’ve ever had.” He cradled his head in his hands like he was ashamed of himself. “I can’t believe we went that far in front of you, Lawrence. I’m so glad you fell asleep when you did. I had every intention of…of going even further. It might be time we go on the wagon for a while, Lar.”
Larry didn’t agree, but he didn’t disagree either. “Maybe we have been pushing the envelope a little lately.”
“Pushing it? I’m pretty sure we tore it open and fucked it last night.” He snuck a glance at me. “Are we cool, Granddaddy? No hard feelings or anything. I don’t want you to stop coming around.”
“No hard feelings. I’m glad I fell asleep when I did too. If I hadn’t, things might have gone much too far. Believe me, I had all the desire. You two put on a hell of a show.”
Stephan laughed. “I think we passed ‘too far’ when we started shotgunning smoke back and forth. And you, naughty Granddaddy and your busy hand on my butt…”
He laughed some more, and I laughed with him. “If I was thirty years younger…” I left the statement hanging in the air. “But I’m not. I’m an old man, and a married one at that. I shouldn’t be trying to keep up with the young. How about we have some breakfast? I’ve got to get home and make up with Walt.”
I stood from the table with the intention of offering to help cook. My unbuttoned shirt flapped open. Stephan gasped at the sight of my scarred body. I pulled my shirt closed and tried to make my fingers latch the buttons. The joints of my right hand were still locked and the fingers refused to work. I banged my hand on the table like it was a broken tool. “I’m sorry. My hands won’t work this morning. I can’t manage the buttons.”
Stephan stood from his seat and moved to stand before me. He held his hands out. I thought he was going to button my shirt, but he opened it instead. “What happened to you, Lawrence? Who hurt you?”
I answered his question, but I didn’t provide any detail. “I was wounded in the war.”
Stephan touched one of my widest scars with a careful finger. “This isn’t a wound. This is…I don’t even know. Does it hurt?”
“It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
He slid his hand across my belly and touched where my navel used to be. “It did though, didn’t it?”
“Yes, it hurt for a long time. It hurt for years.”
He gasped a rattling breath as his hands explored the fifty-year-old damage to my body. “Your life hasn’t been easy, has it?”
“No one’s life is easy. The Bible says man is born to suffering. I’ve had great joy in my life. I’ve also had deep wounds and tragedy. Everyone’s life is like that.”
Stephan surprised me. He seized me in an enveloping hug. The hug he gave me wasn’t one of his normal performative embraces. This one was genuine. “I’m sorry for your pain, you dear, sweet, kind man. I’m sorry for taking advantage of your kindness. I’m sorry for seducing you.”
“What are you talking about?”
He blurted a confession in my ear. “I wanted you to watch. I wanted to do more. I thought it would be fun. I wanted you to have fun. I didn’t mean to hurt you. You were so sad last night. I thought getting you high and inviting you to bed would make you feel better. I didn’t mean to make you feel dirty.”
I was about to ask him to explain himself when he sprang away from me with a shouted apology. “I’M SORRY, WAS THAT TOO TOUCHY-FEELY?”
His use of the very words I had used put me on my guard. I asked the obvious question. “Were you listening?”
“YES! I’M SORRY! Please don’t be mad. I woke up when you and Lar did. You were yelling in your sleep. I guess you had a nightmare. When you scolded Larry for not having pants on, I figured you were mad about last night. I was afraid of what you might say. I followed you down and listened from the hallway.
“That’s why I said what I did about going too far. Until I heard you talk, I didn’t think we went far enough. Please don’t be mad. Larry loves you so much. I…I do too. You’ve been there for us. You never made fun of me. I know that a lot of men think I’m silly because of the way I act. I’m so different from you, but you never made me feel that way. You always treated me nice, like we’re family. You like me just the way I am. I don’t want to lose you because I was stupid.”
I needed a minute to mentally unpack everything Stephan had admitted in his half-shouted speech. I tried to deal with his confessions in order. “I’m not angry you listened. I didn’t say anything to Larry that I wouldn’t have said to you. As for the rest of it, I kind of guessed that what happened last night was more or less by design. You thought you were helping.
“As for the rest of it, getting me high and trying to seduce me, we’re all to blame for that, me included. I showed up here last night with my heart on my sleeve and my better judgement up my ass. I was hurt, and I was sad. You took advantage of my situation, and I let you. I should have known better than to try drugs for the first time when I was alone with two men I find very attractive. On the other hand, I should have been able to trust the two of you to respect the boundaries of our relationship. Even as I say that, I realize that neither of you believe in boundaries. I was too weak to stand up against your permissiveness.”
Stephan hung his head in shame. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want you to be sorry! If you listened, that means you heard everything I said. I want you to think about it. I want you to think real fucking hard about what you want out of life. Every choice has consequences, some good and some bad. If you choose to roll in the flesh like I once did, you’ll experience great physical pleasure, but you’ll open yourself to big risks. You could end up in jail, for a long fucking time.
“If you choose to live for each other, like Walt and I have, you could experience incredible emotional fulfillment. You might also have your heart broken. To truly love someone is to be stripped bare before them, both physically and emotionally. The risk is enormous. You have to show yourself with all your good points and all your flaws. When you do, you hope like hell the other person thinks your good points outweigh the bad.
“Last night, Stephan asked me to share my dreams and my dreads with him. Have the two of you ever shared those with each other? Have you ever bared your souls? Only by doing that, by admitting all that you hope and all that you fear, can you ever truly love one another. Walt and I did that, once upon a time. Maybe we need to do it again. Either way, in my experience there’s love and there’s sex. Sex is great, but it’s fleeting, like youth. Love endures even after sex loses its luster. I enjoy sex, but I recommend love.”
Stephan had a question. “Why can’t we have both; each other and everyone else too?”
I shook my head. “That way doesn’t work. You can’t dedicate your lives to each other while an endless stream of other men treat you like a turnstile on the subway. I’ve never seen it work, anyway. I know men who’ve tried.”
Stephan and Larry both seemed to shrink under the weight of my words. That’s not the reaction I wanted. I didn’t want to make them feel bad for the choices they made. I wanted to help them. “I forgive you, alright? You’re both forgiven, with two conditions.”
“What are they?” Larry asked.
“The first is that I need to be able to trust you.” I tried to point at Stephan, but my hand wouldn’t open. I waved a claw vaguely in his direction. “You had to know that I would have resisted your advances and that’s why you introduced me to reefer to break down my defenses. Never again. I shouldn’t have to be on my guard around my friends. You promise me right now that I can trust you to never make advances toward me again. Reefer smoke and sex are not the universal prescription for a bad day, get me?”
The couple apologized and promised that I could trust them in the future. I accepted their apology and went on with my second condition. “The other thing is I want you take some time to think about your futures. The smartest thing I ever did was to take Walt’s hand when he held it out to me. His love made me a complete person. Now that I’m an old man, I couldn’t imagine where I’d be if I hadn’t. You two are not going to be young forever. Think about where you want to be when you’re my age. If you want to talk to me, or Walt, or both of us, come see us. We’ll tell you anything you want to know. We don’t know everything, but we’ve got a lot of experience. Alright?”
They agreed to my conditions and thanked me. Once that was settled, I decided I didn’t want to be around the couple any longer. As much as I loved them, their company had soured on me, and I suspected mine on them. The fun was over, and I needed to see my husband. I decided to forgo breakfast. The three of us hugged and kissed and I got Owen’s overcoat from the rack so I could leave.
Stephan stopped me when I was on my way to the door. “I’ve been thinking a little bit, about your situation with Walt. You said that every time you turn around, he’s off doing something he shouldn’t be. I couldn’t help but wonder why you weren’t with him. Maybe he doesn’t want to feel like a burden. Maybe he hates having you do all the work while he sits by the fire. Why don’t you stick by him? Do everything with him instead of for him. If he needs rest, sit by the fire and hold his hand. If you need to fix a meal, do it together. If he wants to check on the restaurant, drive down with him, then take him right back. Let him help you. Maybe he’ll let you build the fire, if you let him do up your buttons.”
I kissed Stephan’s cheek. “You’re a sweetheart. I’ll try it.”
I wished the young people a ‘good morning’ and set off for home.
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
