“Why did you do that?” I ask him.
“What?”
He really doesn’t know.
“The kiss. Why did you kiss me like that? In front of everybody.”
It’s not that we haven’t kissed in public before. We’ve been kissing and making out a lot (to a degree), and sometimes other people are in the vicinity. If I had my way, I’d clear out Central Park for just the two of us, but I know that’s not about to happen, so I haven’t minded when he’s kissed me in places like that. Because I can’t wait, either. I’m always wanting to be close to him, in a way that scares me and occasionally makes me feel very, very happy.
But this time was different. He was kissing me to prove a point, and I felt beside the point.
We’re walking past the doorman station, and Gabriel’s nowhere to be found.
“I should call the super,” Ely says. “It’s not that I dislike the guy—he’s great. But it usually helps to have the doorman somewhere in the vicinity of the door.”
I’ve always wondered why there aren’t any female doormen (doorpeople? door attendants?) in New York City. It’s the last stronghold of Big Apple sexism, I guess. Nobody seems to mind it. Like it’s fine for a woman behind a reception desk to buzz you up or arrange a cab or call the police if you stagger in bleeding, but put her in a doorway and she’d presumably turn into a sobbing, helpless wreck. I want to ask Ely about this, but then I realize I’m sidetracking.
“Really,” I say, “why did you kiss me in front of everybody?”
Ely looks at me like I’m more than an idiot but less than a genius, and says, “Could you possibly believe it’s because at that moment I just wanted to kiss you, and I didn’t care who saw?”
Is that it? He’s certainly done it before—that spontaneous grab, that sharp detour into a dark doorway, that naughty (naughty!) ear-bite in the back of a cab. Just last night, he was kissing me at an ATM, delaying my transaction, hitting the button to translate it into Russian and Chinese (or was it Japanese?) so we would keep on speaking in tongues. I was so conscious of the cameras, of the thought that we were on some grainy videotape loop that a security guy monitoring the loop for two dollars an hour in India was going to post on the Web. It was a performance, but it was ultimately okay, because it was an anonymous performance. Not like at bingo, with everyone seeing.
But maybe it’s just me. Because I’ll admit it: Whenever he does it, whenever he so clearly wants me, there’s this undeniable part of me that’s thinking, Why? I am so much more Napoleon than dynamite, so much more Play-Doh than Playguy. He’s a twink and I’m a Twinkie, and I can never forget that. Never for one moment can I feel comfortable when he is so much more beautiful and so much more experienced than me. I wonder if this is why we’ve gone nowhere near having sex yet. Maybe the worst thing about me asking about the kiss is that I can’t believe that I alone am a good enough reason.
He doesn’t seem bothered by the question, though. Just a little bewildered. And since he’s always a little bewildered, it blends into the early evening. It’s not quite dark yet and we’re headed up to the Museum of Natural History, since it’s open late on Fridays and you can pay what you want without feeling like you’re cheating the mummies of their suggested retail price.
I haven’t gotten to talk to Ely all day, and I know I have to. It wasn’t the right time when I showed up at his apartment, since his moms were having a tense moment and Ely was excited to show me the model he was making for his architecture class. Then there was bingo, where I kept spacing, thinking about what happened this morning—I think I actually had bingo about four calls before I said I did, but I wasn’t paying enough attention to be sure. I was also hoping Mrs. Loy would say, “I’m knackered, you ponce!” which is something I’ve always wanted to work into conversations but never quite manage to. Like bollocks. Such a great word, no way to really use it. Not in my life, at least.
“Are you ready for ‘Smell!’?” Ely asks, since that’s where we’re going—this megapopular exhibit about smell that everybody’s been talking about.
“I gave myself a nostril enema just this morning,” I tell him.
He laughs. And I love when he laughs, because he’s not one of those people who laughs at just anything. You have to earn an Ely laugh, and when I’m with him, I actually find myself saying things that are laughworthy. I enjoy myself more.
And, yes, all of that scares me, too.
I don’t see why I don’t tell him right now, before we get to the museum. But I feel so silly, so childish, to be so worried. This is something Ely’s already gone through, probably before he learned how to walk. I am such an amateur.
If I keep talking, if I keep joking, Ely won’t know what I’m thinking, what I’m worried about. He doesn’t really know me enough yet to see the warning signs, to take one look and know to say, “Hey, what’s wrong?” I’ve never had that with anyone, really. Just myself. I always know my signs.
Conversation turns, as it often does, to Naomi.
“I just don’t get it,” he says. “Other Bruce was perfect for her—the perfect hydrant. Hopelessly devoted.” He pauses. “But I guess it does make sense, in a way. She thrives on conflict. And probably the only conflict she ever got out of him was when she was debating with herself about dumping him.”
I hate this. I feel like it’s all my fault. He is so hurt. He admitted it at first—that first week when he was waiting for her to call, waiting for the dove to appear over the ocean. At the beginning of the week, he’d jump up for every ringtone . . . even if we were making out, even if we were somewhere awkward, like a movie or a restaurant. Then, as the days passed, he turned wistful. He’d hear the phone and say, “Maybe it’s her.” He’d finish what he was doing before checking. But he was still disappointed when it wasn’t her.
The week mark was clearly a milestone. Once the friendship breakdown finished its Sabbath, once they had their PO box pissing match, things started to get ugly. He gave in and texted her a simple So, you don’t have anything to say to me? And then—two days later—her response:
I don’t.
So he decided he didn’t, either. And they wouldn’t. So they haven’t.
Ely swears up and down that it doesn’t have anything to do with me, that their friendship is much too big a thing to have ended over a boy.
I hope that’s true.
I don’t believe it.
I tried to talk to Naomi myself. She never picked up. I left voice mails saying I was sorry, telling her that it hadn’t been working, explaining that it wasn’t anything planned, but it was something I had to do. My apologies probably lasted longer than our relationship. In the few times we’d run into each other—like at bingo—she tucked me next to Ely under her emotional invisibility cloak. As if I was a part of him now, lost in the land of the banished.
The “Smell!” exhibit isn’t as crowded as we thought it would be. There’s a huge horizontal nose at the beginning that can be entered through the nostrils. Even though some of the people around us look very serious, like they’re smell professors or something, we can’t help but act like we’re eight-year-old booger fetishists.
“If your nose is runny!” Ely shouts.
“You may think it’s funny!” I shout.
“But it’s snot!” we shout together.
We play with some supersized cilia, then passage through some nasal cavities. When we get out, Ely pulls me aside and looks all earnest.
“I have a question,” he says, touching me lightly on the arm. The gesture is the opposite of the hasty bingo kiss. Under the light of a glowing mucous membrane, I brace myself for whatever’s coming next.
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” he continues, moving closer, looking me right in the eye. “But I just wonder . . . would you still love me if my name was Gland?”
I can’t stop or save myself. I say, “I’d love you even if your first name was Gland and your last name was Ular. I’d love you even if your name was Excretion.”
“Serious?” he asks.
“Serious,” I say.
This is how I can do it—how we can do it—being serious in an unserious way.
But still . . . there is the real serious underneath.
The next room is full of perfumes and an explanation of how perfumes are made. I’m a little disturbed by the origin of ambergris, but I get over it. Then we hit the nose amplifiers, where you can plug in your nostrils and breathe in different scents. Everything else is blocked out, like using headphones in your ears. I try some out (the plugs are one-use-only, much to my hygienic relief) and am dosed up with the deepest, purest almond I’ve ever experienced, including taste. Then I stupidly stop and smell the coffee, and I can’t block out the morning anymore. It’s there, and I can’t escape what it means.
I must be standing at the station for too long. I feel Ely’s hand on my shoulder, hear him say, “Hey, be careful—too much of that and you won’t sleep tonight.”
I take the plugs out and throw them away. But even if the scent dissipates, the thoughts don’t. In some way, Ely and I cross over, because he sees this, and even if he doesn’t say, “Hey, what’s wrong?” he clearly recognizes that there’s something wrong, and he isn’t going to sidetrack me or sidetrack himself until he knows I’m okay.
So I tell him, “I think I came out to my mother this morning.”
Why did I think he would laugh? Why did I think he would say, “Oh, that’s not so bad?” Why did I think it was important only to me?
“Oh, Bruce,” he says, and then he just reaches up and moves his thumb gently under my eye, wiping the tear that feels like it’s been hanging there all day.
There are too many people around me, and I say that, and Ely takes me to a quieter room, one of the diorama rooms that nobody really visits anymore, detailing the everyday life of a 1950s Eskimo. We sit on a bench, and he holds my hand and asks me what happened.
And maybe it isn’t as bad as I’ve felt, because I actually smile even though I’m crying a little again, and I say, “It’s actually because of your name.”
I tell him about how it was just a regular morning, with my dad already at work and my mom having her morning coffee. I slept over to do some laundry and get some work done away from the dorm. We usually talk about classes and things, but this morning, her first question was:
“Who’s Ellie?”
And I didn’t get it at first. I said, “Ellie?”
It was only when she followed up with “What happened to that Naomi girl?” that I knew who she meant.
“It didn’t work out with Naomi,” I told her, thinking that would be the end of it.
But no. She continued with “Well, that must make Ellie something else.”
I must have looked like a deer caught in a head vise, because Mom put her mug down and said, “I’m sorry. I needed the number for that doctor I called on your phone last week when mine was dead. So I looked on your call log, and I couldn’t help but notice there were a lot of calls to Ellie. I know, I know—I should have asked you. But you were asleep, and I thought you’d be more annoyed with me for waking you up. I really needed the number. My back is killing me again.”
The bizarre thing was, knowing my mother’s mind after experiencing eighteen years of its effects, I was sure this story was completely true. The line-crossing came when she thought she could bring it up with me.
Still, I could’ve let it go. I could have just said, “It’s a friend.” Or “It’s no one.”
But I didn’t want to lie. I didn’t want to tell the truth, but I really didn’t want to lie.
So I said, “It’s Ely, Mom. A guy.”
And then
I added
“He’s my kind-of boyfriend.”
I feel a little sheepish telling this to Ely now, since we haven’t even had the b-word conversation. But he doesn’t dispute it. Instead he asks, “What did she say?”
And I tell him she said, “Does this mean that you’re gay?” Too shocked to sound disapproving or accepting.
And I answered, “No. It just means I’m not straight.”
It was so obvious that neither of us was at all prepared to have this conversation, and neither of us had expected to have it at that particular moment, over that particular mug of coffee.
Then, the weirdest thing of all, the morning continued. I’d clearly altered something, but the shape of that alteration couldn’t be known yet. She didn’t say, “I love you,” and she didn’t say, “I hate you.” She just said, “I’m sorry I looked at your phone,” and I said, “It’s okay. Did you get the appointment?” And she asked, “What?” and I said, “For the doctor,” and she nodded and said, “One o’clock, during lunch,” and I said, “That was lucky.”
We had no idea what we were doing.
“So,” I say to Ely now, “I don’t know what I’m going to go home to, the next time I go home. I don’t even know if my mom’s going to tell my dad.”
“Do you want me to go over there with you?”
I shake my head and tell him no, it’s probably not the best time for him to meet my parents.
He laughs. I feel a centimeter better.
“I guess you didn’t really have to go through this,” I say to him.
“I did, actually,” he tells me, his feet kicking playfully into mine. “It was definitely different, but it still completely freaked me out.”
At the risk of stating the obvious, I ask, “But why? You have two moms.”
“But that’s exactly why,” Ely says. “It’s so hard to explain. It was just so expected in a way. They tried so hard when I was growing up to make sure my world wasn’t entirely a queer one—not that they were ashamed of who they were or anything. Not at all. But they wanted me to have the same kind of options as any other kid. And I think part of me agreed— I wanted to be different from them. I would be the normal—no, normal isn’t the right word. I would be the more conventional one, I guess. I convinced myself of all these things I wanted— to play for the Yankees, to have this big wedding with Naomi, to bring home this girl to my moms so they’d finally have a daughter. I really thought it would happen, that I could do it. I didn’t want all the other kids thinking I was only being gay because my moms were gay. I tried to be straight. Isn’t that stupid? Me? But I did. It was a fun fantasy. But at the end of the day, it was the boys I wanted to kiss. You still have your options, but I knew that something—I don’t know what—had already defined me. I just had to figure out the definition and be okay with it.
“When I finally realized I had to be who I was going to be, Mom and Mom were also a little freaked out. They were worried I was doing it as some way of proving I was on their side. I actually had to persuade them that I was really, truly, genuinely into penis. That was a fun conversation!”
“I’m not sure I’ll bring that up tonight with my parents,” I say, noting to myself that my experiences with penis have still been limited to my own.
“Yeah—save the buggery conversation for a better occasion, like Thanksgiving.”
“Bollocks!” I say. It feels good.
“Bollocks?”
“Yeah, bollocks.”
“Now would be a good time to admit you’re on crack.”
“I’m sorry. Continue.”
It’s Ely’s turn to look sheepish. “There isn’t much more to it,” he admits. “Once my true rainbow colors came shining through, the moms did everything short of writing me a profile on xy.com. I mean, there was this one time when I was looking at this naked picture of a guy on my computer, and then I got a phone call or something and forgot to close it, and Mom Susan went to use the computer before I could close the window. I figured she was going to be all mad, but instead all she said was ‘Ely, you know how little that does for me.’ ”
I try to imagine my mother having a similar reaction, but I can’t.
“Don’t worry,” Ely says. “I’ve dated other guys who’ve gone through this. It always ends up fine. I mean, this one guy, Ono, was kicked out of his house. But you’re not living at home, and I’m sure your parents are much cooler than Ono’s. His dad threatened to call the police. Seriously. He said, ‘Dad, I’m gay,’ and his father shouted that he was going to call the police.”
I can’t say I completely appreciate this sidetrack, but he’s trying in his own Ely way, just as I’m trying to keep the “other guys” out of our Eskimo room.
“Should we head out?” I ask.
“Sure,” Ely says, standing up and offering me his hand. When I take it, he yanks me up and doesn’t let go. I’m almost afraid he’s going to want to kiss me or make out or even hug me right now. It would feel wrong, and I think he realizes this. So he just spins me around once, like we’re dancing. Then, when I trip, he says, “Eskimo two-step,” and instead of laughing looks at me again to see if I’m okay.
I let go of his hand, and we start walking back. We detour by the dinosaurs and the blue whale and the birds of paradise. We talk about other things, especially the people around us.
It’s only when we’re heading out the door and down the front steps of the museum that Ely says to me, seemingly out of the blue, “You know, I’m proud to be your kind-of boyfriend.”
“Bollocks!” I scream out into the night.
“Not bollocks!” Ely calls back.
And for that moment, my heart is lifting too fast to be scared of falling.