“Do you think he’s gay?” I asked earnestly.
He looked at me, not even bothering to argue. Just a raised eyebrow that said, Oh, come on.
“What makes you think that?” I pressed. Ever since my faux pas at Sober Lane, I was fascinated with what made a person seem gay. Neither of us had any gay friends at that point. There were certainly gay people, acquaintances and people you would just know to see around, but for some reason we hadn’t ended up being friends with them.
We were completely cut off from gay culture, and yet we both had perfect confidence in this assumption about James.
“I have eyes,” Jonathan said simply, and he left soon after that.
We ordered a pizza for dinner and James plugged in his TV and DVD player. The only DVDs he had were three seasons of Frasier.
“Your boyfriend thinks I’m gay,” he said, without emotion.
I waited a second before answering. “No.”
He paused the DVD on Kelsey Grammer’s contorted face, ranting about Seattle spa memberships. “Listen,” he said, as if he were about to lay down an important house rule, like no shoes on the carpet. “I’m camp as a row of tents, I know that, but I’m not gay.”
I laughed awkwardly.
“Don’t you think if I was actually gay, I’d go ahead and just be gay?”
I nodded. It made sense. If you walked around with Cher on your iPod then you had probably thought more seriously about whether you were attracted to men than the average rugby-playing alpha male. I saw James as extremely advanced, a person who had interrogated all sides of his soul. He was too emotionally intelligent to get stuck in the doldrums of what music or behaviour seemed gay or straight.
In that moment, he wasn’t just a person to me. He was the future of people.
The truth was that he was terrified.
“What was your endgame?” I asked him once, years later.
“To wait until I could move away,” he said. “And then go somewhere where no one would know me.”
Which he did. Which we both did.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, because before any of that happened, Dr. Byrne happened first.
4
DR. BYRNE was the only other man in my life whose opinions I cared about. When I wasn’t hanging off James’s word, I was clutching on to Dr. Byrne’s. I must have cared about Jonathan’s thoughts at some point. But student relationship dog years being what they are, any deep respect I had for him had long since worn off. We were already behaving as though we were in a years-old marriage, functional but surly.
Dr. Byrne dressed like he was impersonating a university professor. In my memory he has patches on the sleeves of his coat. It’s possible that I’m inventing that detail, but everything else about him suggested coat patches. The first time I saw him he was ten minutes late and sweating. He seemed angry at us, the first years, for having the gall to attend a 9 a.m. class.
He was horrible at mornings, which I related to him being a very big person, 6'5 and extremely wide, a farmer’s build. I’ve had this idea in my head since I was young that a person’s body is a factory, a big Edwardian job, and that you need every worker comfortably sitting at their station before the day’s work can begin. The bigger the person, the further the workers have to travel: trudging up stairs, turning down corridors. This was my own explanation for being bad at mornings and I was happy to extend the kindness to Fred Byrne.
“Right,” he began. “The Victorians.”
He nudged his brow with the heel of his hand, trying to stop a bead of sweat before it fell on the lectern.
“Who knows Sherlock Holmes?”
He knew that most of us would drop out by the end of our first year. That’s how it is with Arts. People love it for the variety but can’t handle the droopy uselessness of it, and when the hangovers and the depressions kick in around February, it’s hard to justify dragging yourself out of bed for Cronus eating his babies. Dr. Byrne was passionate about his subject but he also did not like to waste energy, so he spent those first few classes giving us just enough information about the Victorians so that it might one day be handy in a pub quiz.
He repeated his question, after it was met with silence. This was pre–Benedict Cumberbatch’s reign over the BBC, so it was a dry time culturally for Mr. Holmes, and we didn’t know a lot.
“Detective,” someone said.
“London,” another.
A long silence.
“Drugs,” one boy said, finally, and there was a titter because we were eighteen and imagined ourselves to be the inventors of drugs. “Wasn’t he on drugs?”
A few people in Dr. Byrne’s factory sat down at their machines just then, and he suddenly erupted in talk, talk so fevered that it was at first hard to tell whether he was mad at the boy for saying “drugs” or very happy. He talked about opium, laudanum, morphine and cocaine, which were legal in Victorian England at the time. He noted that non-white writers don’t tend to put out exploratory Drug Books with quite the same tenacity, and was that because they had bigger things to say about drugs, such as how they destroyed their communities. He talked about spending five years in America as a younger man, about how the war on drugs there was merely a feeding tube for the private prison system. He argued with himself, representing both the pro-and the anti-drugs side, his face reddening as he did so. He was thirty-eight in 2009, which I suppose makes him fifty now.
“Right,” he said, at the end of his spiel. He always ended his classes the way he started them: with the word “right.”
We loved it, of course. We thought of him as the Drugs Guy. We would later learn that Dr. Byrne didn’t really care about drugs so much as he liked having a subject that was old and could be argued from a lot of directions. Incest, sodomy, abortion, prostitution: anything that had been around for two thousand years and had always been controversial. I suppose he liked the Victorians because they tried to put rules on things, and he loved debating whether or not those rules should exist. He was everyone’s favourite lecturer, which I sometimes think was not down to his brilliance but to the fact that the English faculty was mostly women. We already know that I was something of a misogynist. So was everyone else, I suspect. I also think there’s something in the fact that most English teachers at most secondary schools are women. Having a large man teach you about a book felt exciting, like Dead Poets Society.