PART ONE
1
I’m pretty sure I lay there and stared at the ceiling for, oh, at least four or five hours. No joke. Every time he moved even a centimeter closer to me, I scooched nearer to the edge of the bed, doing everything in my power to avoid any (more) physical contact. My hands were folded, mummy-style, across my chest. My ankles were pressed together. I had to turn my head away from him because his mouth was encroaching into my personal space, and his breath was none too pleasant, that is, unless you enjoy a barfy mixture of pepperoni and rotting carcass. My neck ached like you can’t believe. A normal person might have pushed him over to the other side of the bed. A normal person might have even just gotten up and moved out to the couch. But I was not about to actually do anything about it.
I swallowed hard. Too hard, it seems, because he felt the vibrations and groaned and put his leg over mine and flopped his arm over my chest. He grunted, farted, and exhaled an unconscious sigh of relief as he nestled in closer to the warmth of my body. Horrified, my eyes shot open. I froze and stopped breathing for several seconds. My right elbow was already hanging over the edge of the bed: I couldn’t scoot over any further without falling onto the floor. I actually considered attempting to slither out of the side of the covers and roll, like a soldier in boot camp, onto the floor. The futon was close enough to the ground. I totally could have done it.
I honestly don’t know why I was so obsessed, disgusted as I was, with disturbing him. Maybe I was worried about a repeat of the performance I’d had to endure several hours earlier. Maybe I was punishing myself. Maybe I was worried he’d think badly of me. Imagine! Him thinking badly of me. I can laugh about that now because I know myself better. But not then. Back then, I thought I was the scum of the earth.
As I lay there awake--all night long--miserable, one thought was playing on a loop in my head: You deserve this, Ben. You deserve this, Ben.
I opened my eyes and saw light half-heartedly pushing through the semi-closed blinds and crawling along the floor, as if it was every bit as reluctant as I was about this whole muscling-through-another-day thing. I heard Lisa in the kitchen, slamming cupboards shut, dropping pots onto the stove, banging glass jars onto the counter. That woman, I swear, was a walking tornado.
I tried my best to tune out the noises emanating from his mouth and nose as he blew snot bubbles and then snorted them back in. He was turned the other way, facing the wall, thank God, so I was spared any sort of visual confirmation when I slowly, almost like a robot--I wouldn’t be surprised if I was actually thinking that while I did it--turned my head toward him. The sick feeling in my stomach instantly returned when I saw his matted long blonde hair, one section on his crown sticking out impossibly, probably the same section that had been imprisoned in my impassioned fist a few hours prior, and undulating in the breeze from the fan I never turned off. Amber waves of grain… I blinked my eyes a couple times. Slowly. I stared again at the spackle-textured ceiling, greeting all the faces of friends both new and old I had met there on many nights similar to last night. They seemed to be mocking me, laughing grotesquely like clowns in a horror movie or characters from a slapstick Saturday-morning cartoon.
With the learned skills of a professional--I envisioned the boot camp scene in order to make myself feel not so whorish--I slid my right leg from under the covers until it touched the carpet. Then, putting my right hand on the floor to brace myself, I pulled my body off the bed without so much as a creak. He didn’t even twitch. I put on my underwear and my ironically-named basketball shorts and a wrinkled undershirt. I turned to the door and placed the tips of my fingers on the knob. I had learned the hard way that if I turned the knob clockwise, the handle would click several times and then squeak, so I turned it, ever so slowly, to the left just until I knew the latch would be free from its hole (too far to the left and something inside the knob would crack or snap or whatever the technical term is for it). I pulled the door open and took one stiff step out, and in the meantime I put my other hand on the outside knob to maintain its position before pulling the door door silently closed and releasing the knob, one half millimeter at a time, to its home position.
I shut my eyes and inwardly congratulated myself on another job well done.
“That’s quite a show you’ve just put on,” Lisa said from the end of the hallway, moving her hands in a silently mocking golf-style clap. “How much rehearsal time have you put into that routine?”
She was joking around, teasing me, but her jokes only served to put a spotlight on my guilt and self-loathing.
“Please tell me there’s coffee made,” I said when I got to the end of the hallway. I knew, based on the bangs and clangs, that there was coffee, but I had to say something that would make me look relaxed and natural, something that would make me appear a bit less guilty.
“It’s a good thing you have me here.”
“You, my dearest and oldest friend, are a blessing,” I said once I had filled my mug, creamer first--a slow drizzle to the count of one, one thousand, two, one thousand--and then the coffee on top, and sat down at the small dining room table.
“You, my dearest and oldest friend, are a blessing,” I said once I had filled my mug, creamer first--a slow drizzle to the count of one, one thousand, two, one thousand--and then the coffee on top, and sat down at the small dining room table.
She sat there for a couple minutes without saying anything, but I knew she was going to ask it eventually. She always asked. She always knew. She tapped her fork on her plate, probably hoping that I would bring it up, which was ridiculous because I had never once brought it up; why should I start now?
“Who is he?” She was never one to sugar coat; although, in her defense, she did try to sound pleasant and conversational.
I didn’t look at her. I turned the pages of the Sunday paper slowly, pretending to be absorbed in the stories about the light rail system being built. “His name’s Creighton.”
She sighed dramatically and then laughed. “Did you fall for another one just because he has a pretty name?”
“I would prefer not to talk about this, if you don’t mind.”
“What happened to Richard?”
“Richard was clingy. He texted me like forty times a day. He insisted that we talk on the phone every night before bed, even if we saw each that day.” I raise my upper lip in repugnance.
“Oooh yeah. That sounds terrible. I mean, who wants a guy who wants to say goodnight to you every night? Who wants a guy who wants to hear your voice just to hear it?” She shook her head as if she had just eaten something bitter. “Yes. I can see why he had to go.”
“Lisa, after dealing with it for . . .”--I had to think about it and do some quick math in my head--“for almost three weeks, I couldn’t deal with it anymore. It was too much. You can laugh all you want, but I’m telling you, it was too much.”
Not two seconds after this, I heard a click. My first thought was, you turned the knob the wrong way, idiot, and my second thought was, I hope he had the presence of mind to put clothes on, and my third thought was, kill me now, someone, please.
“Good morning, Creighton! Would you care for some pancakes? Coffee?” I glared at her, knowing that I was safe because I was facing away from him. I had a sudden urge to pour my coffee on her precious fingers. Her eyes practically glowed while she talked to him.
No, thanks, I better get going. Oh, really? But I made these from scratch. Well, I have work to get to soon. It’ll only take a few minutes; the batter is already made. All right then, maybe just a couple. Please, please, please, kill me now.
He sat down next to me and immediately put his hand on my knee. I patted it patronizingly and returned my hand to its secure position, wrapped around my coffee mug. I was drowning; my Charlie Chaplin mug was my life preserver. I had meant my quick pat to be a sign: I had tried to make it as quick and obligatory as possible. He didn’t get it. He looked at me and smiled. And it wasn’t one of those “hey-you’re-kinda-cool” smiles. It was a full-on “you-are-my-dream-man-and-we-will-get-married-in-no-fewer-than-three-months” smile. This, I should add, was our second time hanging out.
A brief aside: “Hanging out” is a term that gay men often like to use. One might say, “Oh, I didn’t really do much. I just hung out with Kurt last night” or “Steven called and wanted to hang out, so I stopped over there for a few.” Sounds pretty innocuous, right? Well, it’s not. It’s a code word. Its gay-to-English translation is, “We did the nasty.” We say it to make ourselves feel better for doing something we all know is sad and disgusting and desperate. I was just as guilty as the next gay.
“I can’t wait to see you again,” he said, standing in the doorway. He had his hands stuffed up the sleeves of my shirt and he was squeezing my shoulders for dear life.
“Okay then,” I said. “I’ll give you a call this weekend sometime.”
He leans in and latches his lips onto mine before I even know what’s happening. To his credit, it was a short-lived lip-lock. But then he ruined my feeling of relief by putting his index finger against his lips, kissing it wetly, and then pressing it against mine. I forced a smile and waved as he walked to his car. I closed the front door before he had started his car. My hand felt glued to the doorknob. I couldn’t bear to turn around and look at Lisa.
* * * * *
“Mom! Hurry up and come in here,” I yelled from my little brother’s bedroom, also my old bedroom.
I glanced nervously from the ceiling to the floor to the remote control in my hand. I cursed the clock my brother had put on the wall, a monstrosity that sounded like a hammer hitting an anvil each time it “ticked.” My leg bounced and I tapped my index finger on the remote. I checked for the twentieth time that the CD was on the correct track. I quadruple-checked that the volume was still at the level I had preset when the door was closed, before I had swung it open with gusto and announced that everyone should come into Nate’s room.
My mom was rolling enchiladas in the kitchen. I had thought it a stroke of luck that she was making my favorite meal on the evening I had decided to stop over. My little brother and sister were watching TV in the living room. Are they waiting for the freaking show to end, or what? It’s just a TV show, for God’s sake! You can pause it with your magic recorder thingie, can’t you? I had convinced myself that they were making me wait on purpose. I felt like I had been sitting there all afternoon, sitting and waiting for them to finally deign to stop their various activities and come into Nate’s room for exactly three minutes and forty-two seconds.
“Oh my gosh, can you stop yelling at me now?” My mom sat down on the bed next to me. She folded her kitchen towel in her lap and rubbed the fronts and backs of her hands against it a couple times.
“Are Nate and Claire coming?”
My mom rolled her eyes. I wasn’t sure how to take that. “Nathan! Claire! Are you guys coming or what? Your brother’s on the verge of a heart attack in here.”
They both sauntered in and plopped down on the floor, smiling from ear to ear. They acted like they hadn’t just kept me waiting for three hours.
“So what’ve you got this time, dude?”
Claire moved next to my legs and wrapped her arm around my calf. She looked up at me and stuck her tongue out.
“I just finished it this afternoon. There aren’t any words to it, just my voice.” I raised the remote and aimed it at Nate’s CD player. “It’s all my voice,” I added.
I pushed play and felt like I was going to throw up.
Since about 9:30 that morning until 4:45--five minutes before I sprinted out the door to drive to my mom’s house--I had been working on this song. The main melody had been floating around in my head for a while, and I had finally sat down and recorded the piano part and all the voices. There were parts that had four-part harmony. It was in a minor key and the left hand of the piano part seemed to almost cry. The top hand strummed large chords that were meant to sound like a person pleading to Heaven for help. The voices, my voice, ooh’ed and ahh’ed, layering, separating, rejoining, separating again, branching out like the roots of a rose bush. There was that one part near the end where the bass voice falls flat, but I was too rushed and impatient to bother re-recording it. I was hoping that they wouldn’t notice that little glitch.
My mom’s eyes were closed. Nate was tapping the rhythm on his thigh and bobbing his head as if he were listening to a rap song. Claire was turning her head slowly from side to side. I shut my eyes when the flat part came, afraid of seeing their reactions. Then the finale hit: a huge low chord, a huge high chord that echoed the previous one, all the voices in four-part harmony, and then joined by a soft, tender E-flat minor chord. And then everything faded into silence.
“That was very nice, Ben,” my mom said, patting her towel and smiling. “You’re just so dang talented.”
“Ohmigosh, Benner-boo! That was so pretty,” Candace said.
“Yeah, broksi. Pretty song,” Nate added as he walked out of the bedroom, burped, and closed the bathroom door.
My mom gave my knee a squeeze. “I sure do love you,” she said.
On her way out, Candace did a mock-cheer and yelled, “My brother is totes”--right leg kick--”amazing!”--left leg kick.
And then I was left alone again. Just me and the remote control and the hissing static from the speakers. That’s it? That’s all they have to say? I worked on that all day long, and that’s it? But underneath all that, so quiet that I could hardly hear it, was another voice. It was a voice that had been talking to be for many years. It was a voice that I had learned, for the most part, to ignore, to bury deeply under other things, to hide. But there were times when it screamed out so loudly, I was sure that everyone else could hear it. There were times when it exploded out of whatever I had buried it in, climbed up into my brain, and screamed. Times like when Creighton was snoring in my ear and pressing his hips against my leg. Times like this. You’re a failure, Ben. Just give up. They tried their best to sound enthused for you, but you couldn’t even put the time into this one song that it would have taken to make it sound good. You were in such a hurry to be praised that you couldn’t be bothered to fix it. You can’t sing anyway, so I don’t know why you even bothered making this stupid song and embarrassing yourself by showing it to others.
I pressed “eject” and pushed the CD back into its paper sleeve. On my way out to the dining room, I dropped it into Nate’s garbage can.
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