“IS THOMAS your . . . your . . . girlfriend?” Sarah asked, standing in front of the kitchen sink, hesitating before handing her son another plate to rinse.
Monty’s parents had met Thomas, the “older man,” six years older than he, a month before, when they were in Portland to attend their son’s college graduation. They had driven up from LA and stopped briefly at Thomas’s one-bedroom clapboard house, hidden behind a tangle of overgrown salal and blackberry bushes. Monty had laid out a sleeping bag in the tiny living room to suggest the two were only roommates. His parents looked around but, other than his father’s declaring the house a firetrap, didn’t voice any concerns.
That his mother now used the word girlfriend – not boyfriend, not lover, not even that ambiguous term partner – suggested a particular assumption. Of course, she’d never before considered what a gay relationship might actually be like. The word gay meaning queer wasn’t even in her vocabulary. Yes, the “gay revolution” would soon go public, unleashed, so it was claimed, by the New York Stonewall riots of June 1969, only a few weeks after their return from Portland. But this was her son, not some anonymous sexual deviant on a certain named side street of Hollywood where, according to a Life magazine article published the summer before Monty’s senior year at high school, homosexuals lurked in the dark, wearing tight jeans and white sneakers to signal their “disgusting” intent. (Monty had nervously driven up and down the street several times after he’d read the article.) Surely in a relationship, like any relationship, like hers, one person must play the dominant role, the male, and the other the subordinate, the female. Surely it couldn’t be her son who was the girlfriend half. Shorter than him by a foot, she looked up at him now, her face flushed, her hands shaking, afraid of his answer yet needing it.
“No, mother,” he barked back at her, his head held high. “I’m his.”
He could have laughed at her saying girlfriend, gently poking fun at its naiveté. But instead he threw the word back at her, almost violently, confronting her ignorance and fear by flaunting his newly liberated identity and suggesting, just to dig the knife in further, that it was he, her son, who was the passive, female half. He could have comforted her instead and told her he was okay, that homosexuality was a normal occurrence in the vast panoply of human behavior, that it wouldn’t ruin his life or health or career. He could have been sensitive to how she must have felt – confused, anxious, profoundly worried for his well-being. But it was a travesty, he thought, for her to suggest that one of them must be the man and the other the girl. He and Thomas loved each other equally, no one dominated the other, they were equal partners. Surely this would go on as long as they lived together – forever. Liberty, equality, fraternity. Love. Surely it would go on forever.
A YEAR-AND-A-HALF BEFORE they actually met, Monty had spotted Thomas in downtown Portland, in the basement of the art museum, where he’d gone to see a screening of Greed, Erich von Stroheim’s silent classic starring Zasu Pitts. Monty noticed him right away, standing in the foyer of the auditorium with another man about the same age. He gazed at the bulge in the crotch of Thomas’s tight-fitting blue jeans and at the auburn hair that hung in a long pageboy-cut over the back neckline of an off-white Irish knit sweater. He looks like the cartoon hero Prince Valiant, thought Monty. Staring at the two men, he felt a shiver rising from his groin to his breasts, knowing instinctively they were different. He longed to know them, to be with them, to touch them, especially the prince.
The following summer Monty attended an immersion program in Russian at a private college in Monterey, California, where he had an affair with a girl studying Spanish. She was as short as his mother but slim, with perky breasts and curly dark blond hair. He’d had sex with several girls at college. It was okay, but he hadn’t ever sought out the sex part; it was always the girl who initiated it. The relationships never lasted more than a few days or a week or two. But this girl was different. He was strongly attracted to her, but not just because he found her attractive, she was, but because he’d seen her walking in town with a strikingly handsome young man with long blond, leonine hair. As with Prince Valiant, the man he’d seen at the art museum, the sight of the boy had caused a shiver to rise from his loins. Maybe if he got to know the girl, he thought, he could get the boy.
When he hooked up with the Spanish student, it was she, like before with other girls, who coerced him into having sex. She listened patiently, without surprise, as he explained that he was attracted to her male friend. No matter, she said. It’s okay. You can meet him if you want. And then when they had sex it was exciting. She fellated him. No one had done that to him before, and he’d long wanted it, fantasized about it, ever since a junior high school classmate had brought a few friends over, including Monty, and played a porno movie he’d found in his parents’ bedroom when they were away on vacation. It was straight porno, of course, but it was the first time Monty had seen an image of fellatio. And now, finally, the girl was doing it to him. But he didn’t reciprocate the oral sex. And the next time they were together again, he resisted and she intimidated him, deriding his masculinity, laughing at him, until he cried and gave in to her fierce carnality, hating it but wanting it. It would be the same each time they were together.
Toward the end of the summer session Monty marked his twenty-first birthday downing shots of vodka with the other students, all male, who boarded together at the home of the head Russian professor. “To the bottom” they chanted again and again in Russian, until he fell down drunk, under the table, drunk as he’d never been before. He awoke in bed the next morning with a heavy radiating headache that went on for four days. Never again, he vowed to himself, would he drink like that, and never again would he have sex with a woman; next semester he would find a man no matter what.
Back in Portland, at the beginning of his senior year, one of his roommates, the son of a minor movie star and a wealthy banker, suggested they start up a poetry magazine. Determined to solicit work from writers outside their college’s narrow confines, they announced their plans for the magazine at a meeting of an arts organization held at an old movie theater in the north end of the city. Afterwards, someone presented a slide show about an art workshop for street kids. Monty was surprised to see that the guy running the projector was the one he’d seen the year before at the museum – Prince Valiant. If I could only meet him, he thought, things might happen. When the group broke for coffee, he walked directly up to the man, paused for an instant, and looking down at the floor mumbled “Hello” before quickly passing by.
A couple of months later, Monty and his roommate launched their new magazine with a public reading by a nationally prominent poet, a trim bearded man in his late fifties who taught at another college, across town. Before going to the reading Monty smoked a joint with a few of his friends, as he often did in the evenings. Later, after the reading, the poet came up to him and told him he always chose one person in the audience to read to, someone clearly attentive, and tonight it had been him. Monty didn’t tell the man he’d mistaken his being stoned for rapture, but instead asked if he could visit him and show him his own poetry.
Two days later Monty took a bus to the other college. He found the poet waiting in his office, read some of his work to him and then spoke of his confusion about what to do next in life. He didn’t want to go to graduate school, he explained, but to pursue the arts, theater preferably. He’d always loved theater, even as a little boy. He had pressed his parents into letting him take private acting classes. Later he took more classes at a Jewish community center and played minor roles in high school and college productions. The poet suggested he talk to a young man who worked at a café on the campus. He’s a pianist, the poet told him, and he’s connected to the theater community.
Monty went to the café and met the guy, a tall man in his late twenties with thinning blond hair and a developing paunch. The piano player stared intently over his glasses at the younger man while the two talked. “I know exactly who you should meet,” he said after Monty recounted the same story he’d told the poet. “He directs a small theater group. I’ll be right back. I’ll go give him a call. Maybe he can come over and you can talk to him.”
Monty looked out the café window at the damp grass and nearby grove of arbutus, Douglas fir and cedar. Fall had arrived late that year but a soft steady rain had settled in. He loved the rain; everything became quieter, still, somber, so unlike LA, his hometown, with its seemingly endless smoggy days and endless glaring sun-drenched streets. While musing over the changes that had overtaken his life since he’d left home, it crossed his mind that the pianist was the guy he’d seen the year before with the young man in the tight jeans at the city museum and again, two months ago, running the projector at the old cinema. Maybe the theater director is Prince Valiant, Monty thought, the familiar tingling rising from his groin. Maybe the pianist was calling him right now. If so, it would be a third coincidence, more than coincidence; it would be fate. Their meeting was destined. Monty wanted it to be. He willed it to be.
When the theater director arrived – it was him! – the pianist suggested they go for lunch to a diner at the crest of one of the hills overlooking Portland from the west. Prince Valiant, who now had a name, Thomas, drove there in his car, a Volkswagen station wagon; the pianist insisted on taking Monty in his own car.
During lunch they talked about the city’s theater and arts scene. Monty asked Thomas about the group he was directing. The older man was happy to elaborate on his theories and ambitions, and Monty tried to look rapturously attentive though all he could think about was how to get in bed with Thomas.
After lunch the pianist drove them to a nearby park and led them along a path to an isolated bluff. They stood there silently for some minutes, taking in the panoramic view of the city, until Monty suddenly stammered, “I’m really interested in you guys. Maybe more than I should be.” As if he’d been waiting for the cue, the piano player drew the three of them together in a tight circle and got them to wrap their arms around each other’s shoulders. They stood like this for several minutes, Monty’s heart beating fast, his cock erect, pressing hard against his jeans. He felt as if he were in a dream, one of those dreams we dream again and again until we can’t be sure when we’ve awoken whether the dream is a memory of something that actually occurred.
The three returned to the restaurant and drove in two cars as before to the pianist’s small house, more of a shack, not far from the college where he worked. As soon as they entered and took off their shoes and jackets, the pianist began to initiate three-way sex but soon focused all his attention on Thomas alone, sucking him vigorously, fervently, for a long time until Thomas finally came. Later Monty would learn that the musician had set him up, hoping to use him as bait to get involved himself with Thomas, whom he’d been obsessed with for years. Thomas had mentioned to him that he’d seen an attractive guy, Monty, at the theater and described him clearly enough that he recognized him at the café.
When the pianist stepped out of the room for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, Thomas invited Monty to go home with him and, shortly afterwards, they left and spent the night together. Monty was sure they’d spend their lives together.
© G S Sirotnik 2010. All rights reserved.
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