Yesterday's writing

Thing is, I’m not a relationship maven. I just never seemed suited to the endeavor. I could do the dating thing, though I never really liked it. It just seemed so damn fruitless and stupid. Still, I could do it. I could go out to dinner. I could invite guys back for coffee. I could wake up the next day feeling like I shouldn’t have done what I did.

 

But somehow I couldn’t get further than that.

 

Jeffrey was closest. Jeffrey was also gay. If that doesn’t compute to you, think how I felt. We met through Carolann, my roommate at UCSB. The hot Indian summer months at the beginning of sophomore year. We were still arranging our place when he came to visit. He advised me on the best way to position the ficus. I found him cute but a little – strange? That’s how I would characterize it at that time. I was innocent then, too much so.

 

Strange, but I liked him. He was a redhead with green eyes, Irish ancestry splayed across his face. He was also in good shape from riding dressage all summer. Dressage. That should have told me everything I needed to know. He wore a Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt and jean shorts. The hair on his legs was the same color as that on his head. That line of thinking made me blush hard.

 

Let’s be real, though: I knew the guy was gay. I knew it from the moment he asked me to go out with him to the Nordie’s café. I only wish that were a lie. Jeffrey prized his Nordie’s card, loved the piano player they’d installed at the top of the escalator. Over the years of our relationship – whatever that word meant in this context – I’d spend many hours in those air-conditioned confines, pretending to care about clothes that were probably made by some low-wage worker in Bhutan that were now marked up about a zillion percent.

 

Jeffrey and I never slept together. We never even kissed. Instead he leaned his leg against mine: at restaurants, cafes, movie theaters where I’d pretend I gave a damn about what was happening on the screen. I later decided that the way he did it was insidious. Masterful, really. He gave a girl hope. Never followed through, just held out the string and watched me chase, like the world’s worst cat owner.

 

Over the years I’ve tried to look at it from his perspective: he was trying to figure out who and what he was. Then I came along. Obviously he liked me. Obviously he cared about me. Obviously he had some sort of thing for me, otherwise, why would he come up for the weekend, spending chaste nights on our ugly plaid sofa? One year I took him home for Thanksgiving. My mother pulled me aside and said: “Honey. He’s sweet. And kind. And considerate.”

 

We were standing in our huge walk-in pantry in suburban San Diego. My dad was long gone. It was just her and my brothers at that point.

 

“And,” I said, “You think he’s gay.”

 

“Oh, honey,” she said, and took a puff on her Benson & Hedges.