He was gentler than I expected, big brothery, and I was surprised by who he turned out to be. He kissed my hands. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall, like the widow in the poem. Suddenly there were too many feelings. I was overwhelmed and wanted to run.
As the hours passed, we became more emotional and connected as we cared for each other. After we finished, we lay there in the hot summer night. When he walked to the closet, I was scared he was about to kick me out, but he made no move. When I had to go to the bathroom, I put on his shorts and took off. His clothes felt good. I ran down the hall excited, jumping up to swat a light fixture; this just seemed like something that needed doing. It seemed like things might turn out okay.
“What’s up with Miss North Carolina?” I asked him.
“Just kicking the can,” he said. “You know.”
Actually, I didn’t.
“My parents wouldn’t get the gay thing,” he said, continuing. “They aren’t softies.”
I realized that in my haste to make him my protector, I had failed to acknowledge that he wasn’t much older than I was. I laid my head on his chest again as we started to fall asleep, but in the morning, I woke up alone. We had moved the beds together, but Eric had scooted his away in the night. The space between them didn’t look crossable, but I decided it was okay to hold out my hand. He did not take hold and I started to prepare myself. I knew how it was going to be.
By the time I was out of the shower, he was dialing Binky on the hall phone. I should have known it was coming. Looking for love in the gay world of the late 1970s meant dealing with two things: (a) You are a little fucked up. (b) So is everyone else.
“Sooner or later,” he said, “I will have to get married.”
“It’s okay,” I said that morning before we separated. “Don’t worry about it.”
Later I learned that Eric had a rep for sleeping with many women and men. When I saw him around the dorm, he looked and turned away. Our connection scared him, the chemistry. What we had was intense and I wanted more. Intensity was my first addiction. It’s like a drug; it takes you out of normal life. I miss the rush of it.
In the days that followed, I showed nothing, barely acknowledged him. One night, he came to stand by me at a gathering where “Miss You” by the Rolling Stones was playing. Mary, a wild girl from Milwaukee, and I sang along every time the line about the Puerto Rican girls “just dyin’ to meet ya” came on. I thought I couldn’t get any cooler, and then Eric—whom I had been doing this whole performance for—was right beside me. “You know Eric, don’t you?” I asked Mary. “He dates that girl with the watchbands.”
He looked a little wounded, but grinned. Later, when we were leaving, he swatted me on my rear, but he ignored me the rest of the month. I hated it. He was someone who kind of got me.
. . .
At the end of my summer, my father picked me up at the airport and hugged me as if I had spent the summer in Arabia. His love was so big and open, but he made me feel guilty and uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be back there. When he hugged me, I felt myself going stiff.
On the way home, apparently desperate for tales of pretty girls, he tried to pry me open. I fished for something, but he seemed less interested than me in Binky’s watchbands or Jamey—a rich girl from Beverly Hills—and her dazzling array of Diane von Fürstenberg wrap dresses.
“You’ll find someone,” he said. “You’ll get a girlfriend.” He was doing that thing, those lines. Of course he would; this was how it was with fathers and sons, but I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear anymore about girlfriends. He had to know it wasn’t true. But he didn’t. It hit me that we were always going to miss out on each other.
He would be disappointed when he discovered that there would be no grandchildren and bereft over what I was giving up. “Having children,” he always said, “is the best part of life.
He wanted me to have all the good things. He would be sad to think I was missing out. I would just be one more thing that had not gone quite right for him.
For the rest of the summer, I worked every day with my father at the lumberyard. Until it was time for me to return to school, he seemed to try to reach out when we were alone, but couldn’t wrap his fingers around someone so elusive. He tried to find some different way for us to be with each other, but I couldn’t go in that direction.
One afternoon, Big George—in a confiding mood—told me that before he met Betty, after he returned from the army, he had been in love with another girl named Betty whom he had planned to marry. She was “a beaut,” he said, like in a guy in a movie from another time.