Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

Nate?”
    “Well, not personally.” Ben grinned crookedly, offering a glimpse of that seductive gap. “I think I’ve seen him, though. Sort of…compact and handsome, right?”
    “That’s him,” said Lenore. “I like him so much. He’s just the nicest person.”
    “He seems to be,” said Ben, casting a sideways glance at me.
    “He really is,” said Lenore. “And he has wonderful taste.”
    I found this endorsement touching. Lenore wanted my young swain to know that she’d had some exposure to queers. If only the ones she’d seen on television.
    After a moment she added: “His friend died in the tsunami, you know.”
    Ben’s smile wilted. “No…I hadn’t heard that.”
    It was news to me, too. “His partner, you mean?”
    Lenore neither confirmed nor denied. “They were in Thailand in this little hut on the beach, and they woke up one morning, and the roof came clean off the hut, and this big wall of water just carried them away. Nate grabbed on to a telephone pole, but his friend didn’t make it. It was the most awful thing. He talked about it on the show.”
    I was mildly unnerved. I’d seen Nate once or twice myself and could picture him tangled in 600-thread-count sheets with his boyfriend—a taller guy, I imagined, and darker, and just as gorgeous—when the unimaginable ripped them from their idyll. But, even thrusting Ben and me into the same situation, I couldn’t get a handle on the horror and the loss. “At least he was out,” I said. “He could be totally open about his grief.”
    “Out of where?” asked Lenore.
    “You know…the closet.”
    Lenore frowned. “Well, I don’t think he’s one of those activists, if that’s what you mean.”
    Irwin was squirming in his chair. “Would somebody please pass the eggs?”
    Ben got up and handed the tray to my brother. “They’re delicious, aren’t they?”
    “You know,” I told Lenore as evenly as possible. “I think of myself as an activist.”
    “Oh… now, ” she said dismissively. “You know what I mean.”
    I did know what she meant. She meant there were good homosexuals and bad homosexuals, and she would never think of me as a bad one. My parents, I remembered, had once categorized black folks in much the same way. They didn’t disapprove of all Negroes. Just the uppity ones. The ones who insisted on special rights .
    Why do I even bother with this? I thought. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a meaningful exchange with these people—one that didn’t focus on scenery or television as a handy means of avoidance. The list of what we couldn’t talk about grew larger all the time. Phony Florida elections. Secret American torture camps. “Intelligent design.” A far-from-intelligent president who wanted to amend the Constitution to insure that wicked folks like Ben and me would never receive equal treatment under the law.
    The truth was that I had long ago stopped caring what the biologicals thought about me, but I had never stopped accommodating their nonsense. It was a nasty old habit not easily broken—making them all feel as comfortable as possible. I gazed around the room, looking for an easy route back to the banal. I found it in a large kitschy print over the fireplace: a woodland chapel at night, its windows ablaze with a golden glow.
    “That’s very nice,” I said. “Is that a new acquisition?”
    Lenore beamed with pride. “It’s a Thomas Kinkade. You know, the Painter of Light? Irwin gave it to me for Christmas.”
    Irwin puffed up like a partridge. “ That one set me back big time,” he said. “Lemme tell you.”

    That night, after dinner at the Outback, we returned to Inn Among the Flowers and decided to hit the sack early. The day had been draining for both of us. Ben was toweling off from a long shower when he tossed a low-grade thunderbolt my way: “Why didn’t you tell me your brother was hot?”
    I took that in for a moment, stretched out on the bed, then looked up from a pamphlet on Disney World and the Epcot Center. “Because he’s not,” I said evenly.
    “C’mon. I know he’s your brother, but you must be able to—”
    “What exactly is it that turns you on? The comb-over? The beer gut? The Banlon shirt?”
    Ben laughed. “His gut’s no bigger than yours.”
    “Well…technically maybe.”
    “He’s just a big rugged guy, that’s all. Sort of a Suit Daddy. A countrified Suit Daddy. There are whole websites for those guys.”
    “I’m sure,” I said.