Best Gay Romance 2014 Read online

  Days later, Evan asked me why I hadn’t just reached out and pounced on Scott and I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t the most pressing desire of the moment, or, that, of course, it was the most pressing desire of the moment but that doing it, having sex—or trying to engage Scott in the possibility of sex with me—would have spoiled what was already there—a lush, romantic, sensual moment where nature displays every obvious and specific way you have been blessed.

  I didn’t tell Evan that I slept fitfully on the blanket, however, that I fell into one dream after another, thinking that Scott was reaching out to me, embracing me, his lips pressing mine open and his hands finding every part of me that I wanted him to find. I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed that he had moved closer, so much so that when I woke in the morning I was exhausted and hiding an erection that would not subside until the startling cold water of the lake forced it to disappear. I felt like a foggy old fool trying to keep up with Scott as we floated our things back to the boat, my throat dry, my breath stinking, what hair I still maintained spiking up in patches. Scott was unusually uneasy that next morning, as if he had made a mistake in camping out and now he was running late and he would soon be in big-time trouble with someone, and we used the motor to sail the boat back to the harbor faster.

  The drive back to the cabin was quiet and respectful, but I soon began wondering if my dreams the night before had been dreams at all; maybe Scott really had reached out to me sometime during the night and was now feeling sheepish about his behavior. I tried and tried to work out if it had been a dream or real, or if it had merely been an old man’s drunken memory of another lover from another time. At the cabin I invited Scott inside for breakfast or coffee or anything he wanted or needed, but he gracefully declined everything I offered and drove away, leaving me propped up on my crutches in front of the door. For the rest of the day I slept as much as I could, lifting myself back into the dream of Scott as often as possible, remembering the way he had smelled and tasted and felt in my arms—or at least as I had imagined him. After a few hours of more sleep and dreaming, I masturbated myself awake and that seemed to break the spell. I had gotten him (somewhat) out of my system and was ready to move on.

  I spent the rest of my time at the cabin reading the bag of books I had brought, some worthwhile, others not so. The first day or so I hoped Scott might call again and then I thought about calling him, but I knew that it was not the right thing to do—to engage myself further in such an impossible flirtation. On my final day, I packed and called the car service to take me back to the train station. Scott’s mother said someone would pick me up soon, and I sat and waited on the porch hoping it might be Scott who showed up.

  It wasn’t Scott who picked me up, but his uncle, a handsome man (about my age!) who clearly displayed the genetic roots of Scott’s attractiveness. “You’re Scottie’s friend,” he said, while he lifted my bag of books and heaved them into the back of the truck. “He said he had a good time out on the lake with you. Shame about your leg. Hope it’s feeling better.”

  I nodded and smiled and we talked about the local landmarks as he drove me back toward the village and the train station.

  And that was that, my one and only visit to Evan’s cabin. Back in the city, it all seemed like it had happened to someone else, as if it were a scene from a movie or out of one of the books I had read.

  Months later, however, when Evan was meeting his lover and some other friends at the cabin—he had been unable to leave the city at the same time as the rest of the group—he called the car service I had talked about to take him out to the cabin. He described the pickup truck exactly as I had—red and old and clunky and noisy—and mentioned that his driver was an “impossibly handsome young man.” It wasn’t Scott but his older brother, Ray, who was the driver, and after listening to Ray’s litany of the town’s landmarks—the Laundromat, the green barn, the new stone bridge—Evan asked Ray about his younger brother, explaining he had heard of Scott from a friend who had used the cabin while his leg was healing.

  “He’s flown the coop,” Ray said, smiling and laughing as he turned onto the path that led to the cabin. “He got his sorry ass out of here as soon as he wised up to that girl who was chasing him. He never really wanted to stay, you know? He’s got the family wild streak bad. He’s working down in Florida now, taking tourists out on fishing boats or out sailing. He’s out doin’ the world. Seein’ what he can see.”

  “I’m glad he went for the adventure,” I told Evan when he relayed the story to me later, sometime after my leg had healed and I was once again hunting for a new boyfriend. “Sounds like he’s happy—doing what he should be doing.”

  TRUE IN MY FASHION

  Paul Brownsey

  I am very happy with Kenneth, but the relationship involves a lie. I told it thirty-three years ago.

  If you distinguish big lies from little lies, mine was only a little lie. It isn’t, for instance, that I have a wife and children but have lied to keep them from Kenneth’s knowledge all these years.

  Nor is my lie anything like that told to me by someone I was with before Kenneth, a person who said he was a television producer for BBC Scotland. I thought his rundown, two-room flat in Partick was a bit of a dump for a top BBC producer, but he said it was just a pied-à-terre and that his real home was a big house in Helensburgh where, unfortunately, we couldn’t go because his mother lived there. One room had bare boards and an old vinyl settee and a TV. The other contained a cooker and dripping sink, a wee Formica-topped table, three stacking chairs, a shower cabinet, and a mattress on the floor where we had sex.

  Once, he told me that Debbie Harry was coming to dinner with us at the pied-à-terre. Then the story was that she’d cancelled because of flying to New York to record a duet with Darryl Hall but had sent me a present as an apology. I looked at the album, which was signed in her name with love to me, and thought how the bedsheets always reeked of cooking smells, which implied he stayed there a lot.

  One night, Kenneth came up to me in the bar and told me that my BBC producer was just a clerk in Glasgow Council’s cleansing department.

  When I learned he wasn’t what he’d said he was, I wasn’t upset or angry with him. You need to know a person for that, and here I felt I did not know anyone, because he’d deceived me about himself. If a tree in the park dematerialized before my eyes, I wouldn’t feel shock or alarm, because it would be too weird and disorienting for ordinary feelings.

  No, my lie was nothing gross like that.

  My lie was to claim to have written a poem I hadn’t. In fact, the poem was a song lyric by Irving Berlin.

  Kenneth was chunky and open faced and bright eyed. He said “great stuff” and “okeydokey” a lot, and he soon adopted “no problemo” when it came in. At first I treated all this as a front behind which there had to be weakness and self-doubt, but by the time he spilled the beans about my TV producer/cleansing clerk, I’d never noticed a single chink in him through which that stuff could be glimpsed. It still amazes me that in those days Kenneth could be so ready to live together, buy a house together and so on, without any fear of going public as a gay couple, exposed to neighbors and family and employers, whereas this fear pervaded most of us so completely we didn’t realize it was there and thought we were caused to act only by passion or its absence.

  He said he was telling me about the TV producer/housing clerk because he wanted to protect me from hurt and then I heard coming from the dance floor Debbie Harry singing “Heart Of Glass.” It was hard not to see this as a sign, a record by someone about whom I’d been lied to playing just when I’d been enlightened about the man who told the lie and forged Debbie Harry’s signature and love on the album.

  Actually, I knew there were no signs and everything was just chance.

  I said to Kenneth, “May I have this dance with you?” Note the phrase.

  Later that night, in bed, he said to me, “You were so formal,” and he laughed. It wasn’t the hurtful mocking
laughter of someone who sits outside the world and finds you an object of amusement, but the upholding laughter that spills over from love.

  He said, laughing again, “So formal that I was expecting you to say, ‘May I perform fellatio upon you?’” Then he hugged me like he was a wall against the world, and so we were happy together at once.

  Be patient. I am getting to my lie.

  I love musicals, though now I have to keep the fact from Kenneth. I once read that Irving Berlin wrote a huge number of songs in which some aspect of dancing features as a metaphor for some aspect of love: “Change Partners” and “Cheek To Cheek” and “Let’s Face The Music And Dance” and “It Only Happens When I Dance With You,” et cetera. One of his early efforts was “May I Have This Life With You?” This, obviously, is a play upon the traditional formal request for a dance—the formal request that Kenneth laughed at in such a wonderful way the night we became an item. Berlin wrote it to the tune that he later recycled as “The Hostess With The Mostest” in Call Me Madam. Berlin did that sort of thing. The song everyone knows as “Easter Parade” began life as “Smile And Show Your Dimple.”

  Well, because “May I Have This Life With You?” echoed what I had said to Kenneth on our first night and also because the words expressed what I truly felt and still feel, I wrote the lyric in my first Valentine to him:

  May I have this life with you-oo?

  Let me take you by the hand.

  It’s a life just made for two-oo,

  Dancing to a ragtime band.

  And if we match steps to the rhythm this whole life through

  We’ll be in each other’s arms for the next one too.

  “Did you write this?” he asked. Of course he got the allusion to my invitation at once. He gave his laugh that honors a treasured possession.

  “Yes.”

  I’m not going to deny responsibility and say, I don’t know what came over me, or It was just a sudden mad impulse. In olden days people might even have said, An evil spirit spoke through me. Being that I’m a human not possessed by a demon, lies don’t just pop out of me. And it would be dishonest to pretend that my yes referred only to the physical act of writing the lyric on the card.

  After I said, “Yes,” Kenneth kissed me and said, “Re your request re having this life with me, no problem at all.”

  I hear you saying, Is that it? That’s your lie? Come on! It was harmless enough.

  Or: Well, if you are so troubled by it decades later, just tell him.

  No.

  Would he dump you for having lured him in by deceit and false pretenses?

  Of course not. Our love has acquired its own weight and permanence totally independent of that lie.

  Well, there you are, then. Tell him, and he’ll laugh—you go on about his laughter. You’ll laugh together, the moment will enhance you both, and then you can move on.

  I cannot tell him. I don’t tell lies. That is who I am. I’m not like my BBC producer/cleansing clerk.

  My lie has had consequences.

  I was afraid that Kenneth might find me out. He delights so much in pleasing me that it would have been like him to seek out recordings of little-known musicals as gifts. I pictured something arriving from America with a title like The Unknown Irving Berlin. Removing it from its packaging prior to wrapping it in beautiful gift wrap for my birthday or Christmas he glances at the list of the titles, and, since he can never forget the words of my first Valentine to him, it leaps out at him: “May I Have This Life With You?” Out of curiosity he plays it. He discovers I lied.

  So I made a point of saying from time to time, “I don’t know why, but I’ve gone off musicals, somehow.” When he got us tickets for the 1987 London production of Follies, I gave a complicated performance in which I acted the delight I really felt but deliberately added apparently unintentional hints that I was only pretending to be pleased so as to not to hurt his feelings. (“I don’t know why, but I’ve gone off musicals, somehow, but, of course, this is different.”) The more successful I was in this, the more I hurt his feelings, but needs must.

  The consequences did not stop there. Although I said, “I don’t know why, but I’ve gone off musicals, somehow,” I hadn’t, and when the CD era hit its stride and there was a vogue for reissuing old musicals on CD, I couldn’t resist. Such treasures! Of course, things like the original Broadway cast album of My Fair Lady and the soundtracks of the main Rodgers and Hammerstein films would always be available, reissued again and again. But there was a lot of stuff that would only have a brief life in the catalogues, long-forgotten Broadway musicals like Christine, starring Maureen O’Hara, no less. So I bought them but hid them. I told Kenneth that one drawer contained all my childhood diaries and while, of course, he could read them if he wanted to—for there were no secrets between us—still, I said, I had a sort of irrational squeamishness about anyone reading them. Which of course produced a promise he wouldn’t look at them.

  “Anyway,” he said, “they wouldn’t show me the you that I love. Love this whole life through, remember?”

  You may be thinking that this is a moralistic lesson about how one lie leads to more lies, a web of lies, like in “For Want of a Nail…” the kingdom was lost.

  No, that’s not the point at all.

  But when, you might say, did you listen to these CDs? Surely it was no different from not having them at all, not being able to play them?

  Oh, but possession is a bulwark.

  And something might happen that would allow me to play them freely, for instance, Kenneth’s death.

  Of course, they might undergo that process of CD decay called bronzing and become unplayable, but to be on the safe side I stored second copies of particular favorites, preferably different pressings so that if one bronzed the other might not. I also started secretly putting them on an MP3 player, but Kenneth isn’t often away so I don’t get much opportunity for that.

  Sometimes I take a horrifying risk. I put a show musical CD in a classical music case and in Kenneth’s presence put on the CD and listen to it through headphones. Suppose Kenneth suddenly notices the CD case while I am listening to, say, Kiss Me, Kate, and says, “Hey, Beethoven’s Fifth, fantastico,” and presses the button to channel the sound through the loudspeakers? That would crack open all the defenses that the world has put in place.

  There’s safer listening to my show music CDs when Kenneth’s dad calls saying he’s scared he might have a stroke and lie there unfound. Then Kenneth goes and spends a night or two at his sheltered housing—he won’t come here because he’s homophobic—and while Kenneth sleeps badly on the settee and cleans the house and helps the old man shuffle to and from the bathroom, I enjoy the guilty pleasure of Belle, a 1961 British musical about wife-murderer Dr. Crippen that flopped in the West End, or Skyscraper, a dull and awkward Broadway musical from 1965 starring Julie Harris that’s redeemed by one song, the sublime, “I’ll Only Miss Her When I Think Of Her,” which, when I play it, in my mind changing the sex like in the Peggy Lee recording, is about me thinking of Kenneth at his dad’s.

  Sometimes on these evenings alone I think it would be only poetic justice if it were I, not Kenneth’s dad, who had the stroke and died alone. Kenneth would find me stretched out cold, the musicals CDs lying around the living room to prove my untruthfulness, while blasting again and again on repeat, Mitzi Gaynor sings about being, like I am, in love with a wonderful guy.

  But if this poetic justice occurred, it would have this comfort: there is a pattern, the universe is being administered, things happen because they are meant to, the risk is not from chance events.

  Of course, someday I shall indeed die, and Kenneth, sorting my things, will unlock the drawer. If he was telling the truth when he said he didn’t want to read my diaries, he won’t discover it’s locked till then. He’ll then discover I lied about its containing diaries and lied about having gone off musicals, but discovering these lies won’t reveal my lie about the poem. Still, it will be like the
stashes of pornography that wives sometimes find and write to agony aunts about: To think that when we make love he is fantasizing about…suddenly a stranger to me…never known him at all. And he won’t be able to tell himself they’re just a hangover from the days when I liked musicals, because a lot of them have recent issue dates on them. I don’t like to leave Kenneth with all that distress, but there is something in me, some little core of self-destruction or self-preservation, that prevents my getting rid of my show music CDs, and I wouldn’t do it even if I managed to put them all on my MP3 player.

  But I’m not without a way forward.

  I have evidence that would allow me to believe that Kenneth has forgotten that I wrote what I did in that card. In itself that’s sad, but the good outweighs the evil. Safety is part of the quality of life, not a substitute for it.

  There’s a program about musicals on the radio on Sunday afternoons, usually hosted by Elaine Paige.

  One Sunday the program came on unexpectedly while I was making dumplings in the kitchen, dough all over my fingers. It would have been too significant, too likely to arouse suspicion of a weakness in my defenses, to go across and turn it off with mucky fingers. Kenneth was cleaning his shoes and mine at the back door behind me.

  Elaine started talking about composers recycling things. Richard Rodgers recycled “Beneath The Southern Cross” from Victory At Sea as “No Other Love” in Me And Juliet. “Getting To Know You” in The King And I began life as “Suddenly Lovely” for South Pacific.

  Furiously, I scraped surplus dough off my fingers with the kitchen knife.

  “Say A Prayer For Me Tonight,” cut from My Fair Lady, ended up in Gigi. “And,” said Elaine, “Irving Berlin’s ‘Hostess With The Mostest’—”

  The scraped-off dough was bloody, a little flap of skin hung from a finger.

  “—started life like this!”

  And the opening lines of “May I Have This Life With You?” began, sung by an ancient crackly male voice.