“Just when I was getting comfortable.”
She hauls herself off the couch, and Donna is left in the room alone. On the muted television a couple frets over choosing between three apartments in Barcelona. Donna’s been to Barcelona. Many times, as it happens. So many times, in fact, that she grew bored with the place. She had told Henrique that she’d sooner die than ever have to go back there again. “Nothing but sweaty tourists, architecture that’s trying too hard, and a lousy church that looks like a sand castle. I prefer Lisbon any day, if you insist on heading that far south.”
Donna smiles: those had been her exact words.
“Well, Gary’s drunk.” Janice wobbles back into the room, holding a new cocktail.
“Oh?”
“Played nine holes this morning and has been throwing them back at the clubhouse ever since, evidently.”
“Oh, my.”
“He’s too bombed to drive. Was begging me for a ride home.”
Janice reclaims her spot on the couch. In Barcelona, the couple’s dream apartment, a two-bedroom in Les Corts, hangs in the balance. House Hunters International fades to commercial.
“What’d you tell him?”
“What’d I tell him? I told that son of a bitch to get a cab.”
Donna laughs. Janice and Gary have one of the most functional, healthy marriages she’s ever encountered, but she appreciates the effort Janice puts into making things seem otherwise. She’s always thought it to be the polite thing to do.
“And what’d he say?”
“That he didn’t have any cash.”
“Oh, no.”
“I told him he should’ve thought of that before he bought his last scotch.”
Donna laughs—harder, this time—and in doing so spills what’s left of her drink onto Janice’s white carpet.
“Shit. Here, lemme get—”
“Oh, forget it, would you?” Janice says. “We’re replacing the carpet with hardwood floors in a month, anyway. And in the meantime, vodka hardly stains.”
Donna sits down again. She kicks her feet up onto the coffee table and lets her shoulders slouch. The commercials end, and she clicks her wineglass against her teeth.
“You’re so good with him,” she says. “Gary, I mean. You’re so good with him. I’m terrible at men.”
Janice turns over on her stomach. Her capris bunch up around her knees. “You’re only saying that because one husband left you for some Spanish slut, and the other one died.”
Donna knows that Janice is trying to make her laugh, but still something stirs in her gut.
“And Paul,” she says. “Don’t forget Paul.”
Outside, the streetlamps buzz. The sycamore—alive, rooted, destructive—sways.
“He still hasn’t called you back?”
Donna shakes her head. “Not a word.”
“What a drama queen.” Janice sits up. “Or maybe you’re the drama queen. You still haven’t told me what this is all about.”
“It’s nothing,” Donna says. Though, is it? No, it’s not. It’s something. She remembers how the AT&T salesman’s forehead had creased as he scrunched up his face and said, Two years is a long time. “And I don’t want to bore you.”
Janice considers this as she quietly watches a yogurt commercial.
Then, she says, “Give me your phone.”
“Huh?”
“I said, give me your phone.”
Janice leans forward and braces herself on the coffee table. With her index finger, she hooks Donna’s purse and drags it over to her.
“Where the hell is it?”
Donna says, “The outside pocket. What are you doing, anyway?”
“I’m going to call that fucker,” Janice says.
Paul
May 3 & 4
His phone buzzes against his thigh. Cradling it in the palm of his hand, he looks at the Indiana number flashing across the screen, then returns it to his pocket.
“My God,” Paul says, leaning into Mark. The bar isn’t crowded, but it’s pretending that it is; Paul can hardly hear himself above the music, some pop song he knows from the radio but that the DJ, a third-rate drag queen named Tina Burner, has remixed within an inch of recognition. “She’s calling again.”
“WHAT?!”
Paul pulls Mark closer to him and presses his lips up against his ear. “MY MOTHER! SHE’S CALLING AGAIN!”
Mark nods, but he keeps his eyes fixed on the bar, where Preston, the taller half of the couple they’ve come to Maryann’s with, is trying to corral the bartender and order a round of drinks. There are only four other people lined up alongside him, but the bartender—a guy with muscles that look like they’re pumped full of air, and who’s wearing a white T-shirt with pit stains and a slogan—KEEP ON LOOKIN’—is busy pouring a round of shots for a blond kid in a tank top who looks about half Paul’s age.
But then again, he thinks, they all do. A bunch of grad students and waiters and God-knows-what-elses who haven’t discovered their first wrinkle, their first gray chest hair; who haven’t started worrying about things like colon cancer and still think cocaine is fun; who haven’t been burdened with the rationality of experience; who don’t need to be up at six forty-five so they can catch the eight o’clock SEPTA to Bala Cynwyd and—Christ. Who was it that said, “Old age is a shipwreck”? Charles de Gaulle? It was either him or Debra Winger—Paul can’t remember. Whoever said it had a point, though hardly as it applies to gay men, he thinks as he watches the bartender pour a steady stream of tequila down the twink’s fleshy throat. Old age for gay men is hardly as repairable as a shipwreck. When a boat crashes into an iceberg, say, and sinks to the bottom of the Northern Atlantic, there are still gems that can be recovered: artifacts and memories and hidden bits of history. With gay men, on the other hand, some new analogy is needed: a nuclear winter, maybe, or global warming. Something irreversible that has layers of denial and repression. It’s why people Paul’s age still listen to pop music and black out on Saturday nights. It’s why he and Mark are here, on a Tuesday, waiting for Preston to hurry up with the drinks so they can stop chewing ice and more successfully forget about how they’ll feel tomorrow morning. It’s why …
“WHO DID YOU SAY IS CALLING?!”
Paul glances over to his left, where Crosby, Preston’s boyfriend (no, fiancé—he can never remember that. They got engaged two months ago) is looking up at him.
“WHO’S CALLING?” Crosby says again.
Preston. Crosby. Think of that wedding invitation. For fuck’s sake, it’s like they made up their own names.
“MY MOTHER!”
At the bar, Preston flips his blond hair out of his eyes. Above him, a small television screen plays a music video that doesn’t correspond to the song that thumps on the speakers: a seventies disco diva, emerging from a beaded curtain, trailed by a cloud of smoke.
Paul tries not to think about how long it’s been since the floor received a proper mopping.
“WHY DON’T YOU PICK UP!?”
Paul opens his mouth to respond, but Mark cuts in.