Читать книгу When The Stars Come Out - Rob Byrnes - Страница 11

I never set out to become an actor. It was something I fell into. I suppose that’s understandable, since I grew up pretending.

The pretense began when I was just a child. My parents were on the lower end of the lower-middle class, but they made it clear that we were supposed to project a “certain image” to the good families of Pittsburgh. They were to think my father was hard working (he did most of his work on the edge of a stool in the corner tavern); they were to think that my brother and I were well mannered (we were hellions); and they were to think that our family was “comfortable,” even though my parents were constantly hounded by bill collectors.

But we all acted, and the good families of Pittsburgh believed that we really were who we wanted them to think.

We were good actors. So good that sometimes we forgot that we were just playing roles…

Two hours into his semi-drunken nap on the couch his phone rang. Noah glanced at the clock on the VCR; it was almost midnight. The movie he had been watching was long over, and now Freddy Krueger was menacing a teenage girl on the television screen.

He toyed with the idea of not answering, but then curiosity got the better of him. Maybe, he thought, it was an interviewee, suddenly infused with gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered/two-spirited/ questioning/whatever-else-had-been-added-that-week pride, who wanted to speak on the record. The sudden thought of an openly gay homosexual in Washington filled Noah with hope.

But when he answered the phone, it was his stepmother’s voice on the other end of the line.

“Noah?”

“Tricia!” He was surprised to hear her voice, especially at that late hour. He had no problems with her—they had always gotten along just fine—but she was married to his father, which made her phone calls a bit suspect. That and the fact that, at thirty-eight, she was just four years older than Noah. The thought that if he were straight she would be dating material had always creeped him out a little bit.

“Did I wake you?” she asked.

“No,” he lied, picking up the remote and muting the teenager’s screams.

Tricia got right down to business. “It’s your father, Noah. I’m afraid something has happened.”

“Is he all right?”

“Yes, yes!” she said, a forced cheeriness suddenly in her voice. “I don’t want you to worry, but I wanted you to know.”

“What’s wrong, Tricia?”

“He had a heart attack.”

“He had a…” The words wouldn’t come to him. “Is he okay?”

“He’ll be fine. The doctors say that it wasn’t all that bad.” She paused. “It could have been much worse.” Another pause—with each one, she was growing more honest—and she added, “They may have to do a bypass. We’re still waiting to hear about that. But he’s alert and responsive.”

Another pause.

“And he sends you his love.”

Noah stiffened. If Tricia had never told him that his father sent his love, he probably would have stayed in Washington, trolling bars in the name of research. But in his thirty-four years, he could only remember his father aiming the L word in his direction on four instances: his college graduation, the day his mother finally had the clarity of vision to leave his father, the night Noah cried when his first lover walked out, and one night when they sat all night at the kitchen table as Max poured his heart out when his second divorce became final. There was a fifth time, too, Noah suddenly remembered, but Max had only said the L word because Noah asked him point-blank, so he discounted it because he had forced the issue.

Noah knew that his father loved him. He showed it in a variety of ways. But where the words were concerned, he failed the verbal, but aced the math. The Abrahams were like a family of starchy WASPs, except that they were starchy Jews instead. Not Tricia, of course. Tricias were by definition not Jewish. But the rest of them were starchy Jews…although about as devout as your average Upper East Side Episcopalians.

So, Noah thought, if his father—the Episcopalian Jew; the Jew from Ordinary People—told Tricia to tell him he loved him, there was a problem.

“Noah?”

“I’m here. Now. But I’m leaving for New York”—he glanced at his watch; it was too late to do anything that evening—“in the morning. First train.”

“That’s not necessary. He’s fine.”

“He’s not ‘fine,’” Noah said evenly. “I need to be home.”

“But your book…”

“It can wait.”

“Really, Noah, it’s—”

“I’ll call you from the train,” he said. “And please call me if anything changes overnight.”

She surrendered. “I’ll keep you posted.”

“One more thing,” Noah said, feeling incredibly brave. “Next time you see him, tell him I love him.”

“All right.” She paused yet again. “All right. I will.”

After he hung up, Noah wondered if she paused because she knew that he wasn’t all that good about using the L word himself. And he wondered if she knew he was scared. And, Noah being Noah, he wondered if she’d even bother to give his father the message.

The night passed without the tragic phone call Noah half expected, although he slept fitfully through a string of unsettling, if unremembered, dreams.

By 6:10 AM, he was at Washington’s Union Station. He purchased his Amtrak ticket, grabbed a cup of coffee, stopped at a newsstand to pick up a copy of The Washington Post and—since it arrived at the last minute—The New York Times, and boarded the 6:30 bound for New York City before he had a chance to sit down.

He gave up on the newspapers before the train reached Baltimore. His mind was somewhere else. After a while, he took out the notes for The Project and tried to make sense of them.

But they were making no sense. The only consistent theme was evasiveness, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to glean insight from dozens of interviews when the subjects were going out of their way to say as close to nothing as possible.

I am not a quitter, he told himself once again, to which—after a moment of reconsideration—he appended, But I’m getting pretty damn pessimistic.

His most recent pessimistic moment, the one leading to the upended wastepaper basket the previous evening, had come as a result of his most recent interview. Earlier in the day, in response to an ad he had run in the Washington Blade, a press aide to a United States senator from Ohio had agreed to meet him at a tiny, not-very-popular bistro in Georgetown. The aide—Noah agreed to refer to him as “G. C.,” which were not his real initials—was nervous bordering on paranoid through their brief meeting, and only agreed to be taped after Noah assured him the tape would, eventually, be destroyed.

Later, back at home in his third-floor walk-up apartment on P Street that almost overlooked Dupont Circle, if you stretched out the window and leaned to the right, Noah listened to that tape. And he didn’t like what he heard. He had hoped that his immediate memory of the interview had been wrong, and that—once he listened to the tape—he would discover that G. C. had provided some useful information. But his memory was, regrettably, perfect.

Noah stopped the tape recorder. “Completelashuel?” What the hell was it he had said, or tried to say, under the relative quiet of that unpopular Georgetown bistro? He rewound the tape and listened again.

G. Well…I guess you could say that I didn’t have to try any-C.:

more, because I became completelashuel.

Noah closed his eyes and concentrated. That’s what he had said. “Completelashuel.” Complete…something? Complete lashuel? No, that didn’t make sense. Lashuel…lashuel…a word that sounds like “lashuel.” And goes with the word “complete.”

Complete…asshole. G. C. had become a complete asshole. That would have almost made sense to Noah, given his work for a complete asshole of a United States senator from Ohio, except this particular Mormon would never use a word like “asshole.”

Noah rewound the tape once again, the recorder playing a brief wee-wee-wee, then hit the “PLAY” button. Again, G. C.’s midwestern drawl came to life, tinny through the small machine.

G. I tried. But then I went to work for Congress, and I,C.:

well…I guess you could say that I didn’t have to try anymore, because I became completelashuel.

Noah tossed the tape recorder down on a lushly padded chair and stared at it for a moment with contempt, as if the inanimate object was the problem, not G. C.

And then, his frustration boiling over, he kicked the wastepaper basket, sending those crumpled balls of paper scattering across the floor.

Even now, with twelve hours or so to put things in perspective, he was no less frustrated. It was hopeless. It was useless. G. C. would forever be a completelashuel—whatever that meant, it couldn’t be good—and there was nothing Noah could do about it, unless he disobeyed the interviewee’s request—was it a request, or an order? More an order, he thought—and followed up on their interview.

Completelashuel. Fuck. “Completelashuel” was starting to sound like a good word to describe this entire project. Nearly ninety hours of taped interviews, most conducted in a low mumble mimicking G. C., hundreds of pieces of paper—from notebook pages to cocktail napkins—with scrawls in his sober and not-so-sober handwriting, documenting the phenomenon of the gay aides to the most powerful men in the United States of America, all justifying their decision to stay in the closet. The only real revelation he had was that party and ideology didn’t matter in his decidedly unscientific survey. Noah may have been able to locate more gay Democratic aides than gay Republican aides, but they were closeted in what seemed to be proportionate numbers. More than a third of a century after Stonewall, career success for gay men—and a few lesbians—in Washington, DC was still all about passing as straight. Or at least asexual.

Asexual.

Noah reached for his bag, stashed under his legs, and rifled through it until he found the tape recorder. He searched the cassette until he found the offending part of the interview and hit PLAY and, yes, G. C. had obviously swallowed his words during the interview, fearful of being overheard. Finally, Noah heard him say that damn word, and closed his eyes in relief. “Completelashuel” was, in fact, “completely” (and he started swallowing on the “y”) “asexual.”

Yeah, that made sense.

He wanted to celebrate his detective skills, but Noah was suddenly gripped by a feeling that warranted no celebration. The whole project was useless. The Project was useless.

So G. C. had forced himself into asexuality. And he still couldn’t talk about it. Again, Noah stared down the tape recorder, blaming it for the state of his world.

G. C. would never come out and tell his boss, the distinguished gentleman from Ohio, that he was gay. G. C. would never even buy Noah’s book, should it ever actually be written, for fear of possibly being seen buying it in a bookstore, or having an online order tracked down, or having a guest see it in his home. Neither would L. G., Dennis (the real name), Dennis (the pseudonym), West Virginia Gary, Missouri Gary, Melissa E., Kay, the one-lettered K., or any of the others who had responded to his Blade ads or Craigslist solicitations.

Noah could document their existence, in an anonymous way, but it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. They would always hide in the shadows, either furtively homosexual or, well, completelashuel. And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. His contribution to the advancement of gay and lesbian rights would be as futile as the insight he was not getting from his subjects.

The book—the book he once thought of as a career maker, an award-winner—might as well be a work of fiction, for all it would matter. His idea had bumped into reality and shattered. People who swallowed words like “asexual” would never allow themselves to be sexual beings. They could be leaders on arms control, the environment, war, peace, education, Social Security, Medicaid, health care, the pork barrel, the Brady Bill, NAFTA, and the nuances of constitutional law—and, on occasion, they could even guide their elected employers through a whole-scale defense of “traditional marriage,” trading a defense of their sexuality for votes—but they would never, ever…

With a groan, Noah sank back into the train seat, trying to force away his frustration, and thought, Why is this so fucking hard? It was a question directed equally at himself and his reluctant subjects.

When he was honest with himself, Noah Abraham recognized that a strong streak of self-righteousness ran through him. He blamed that equally on nature (especially those genes from his father) and nurture (especially the upbringing by his father). When he was honest with himself, Noah Abraham blamed a lot of things on his father.

When he was dishonest with himself, he blamed his father even more.

He had been condemned to a life of openness and affluence. From an objective standpoint, that easy life made The Project so much more difficult for Noah. After all, if Noah was self-righteous, it was because his father had made life so easy. Maybe, just maybe, if he had a bit more fear, he could somehow wrap his head around G.C. and the men and women who lived like G. C.

He put the tape recorder back in his bag and stared out the window, contemplating the adversities he faced because, ironically, his life held almost no adversity. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a young man unsteadily returning down the swaying aisle from the café car, flashing Noah a smile as he passed, which only served to remind him of yet another personal advantage. If it wasn’t enough that he was confident, intelligent, politically conscious, healthy, blessed with family money, and openly and comfortably gay, he also suffered with another intolerable lack of adversity: the knowledge that most people considered him quite good looking.

Gay, rich, smart, and good looking. Curse upon curse upon curse upon curse.

Noah didn’t think twice about his desirability. He knew better, after almost fifteen years as an openly gay man. He knew he wasn’t considered traditionally “handsome”: that designation went to the Adonises with the square jaws, broad shoulders, and height. But he was universally considered “cute,” and that was enough to guarantee him attention every time he wanted it, and often when he didn’t. At five foot seven, he was on the slightly shorter side of male physiology, but even that seemed to work to his advantage. The rest of the package—the olive complexion, deep brown eyes, full head of wavy dark hair, trim frame, and even those dimples that lit up his face when he smiled—sealed the deal.

Over the years, Noah had not been the only person to speculate that perhaps he had been adopted. After all, his parents were not only taller, they were also not quite as “cute.” But that speculation was put to rest by old family photographs, with their evidence of his remarkable resemblance to his maternal grandfather. Noah, of course, was disappointed, because if he had been adopted it would have meant that there had been one tiny bit of adversity in his life. But no. His family had even ruined that fantasy with those photographs. He was half Abraham and half Feldman, and he would have to live with that burden.

He wanted to struggle, but couldn’t find anything to struggle against…so he chose to struggle with himself. As well as those people who displeased him: the closeted completelashuels of Washington, DC.

Noah noticed with a start that the young man who had smiled at him moments earlier was now sitting in the row of seats across the aisle. He gave him a polite nod, turned up his iPod, and turned to look back out the window, watching the fields and swamps and small villages of Maryland pass by.

At the moment Noah’s train was departing Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station, Bart Gustafson awoke, tangled in sheets. He looked around the room in confusion before remembering that he was not at home in Southampton, but rather on a sleeper-sofa somewhere near Lincoln Center. He stretched, feeling an unfamiliar stiffness in his back brought on by the thin mattress.

“Jon?!” he called out to his host as he staggered to the kitchen. Jon wasn’t there, but the coffee maker was turned on and the urn was half full. He poured a mug and sat, taking in the view of the traffic backed up on West Sixty-Fifth Street.

He wasn’t disappointed that his host was out of the apartment. He was a nice enough man, but he was also close friends with Bart’s employer…which meant that most of their conversation revolved around his employer. Bart didn’t take many days off from his job, though, and talking about his boss on a rare vacation day didn’t serve his vacation purposes.

The previous night had been a case in point. After Bart arrived back at the apartment—far too early, thanks to the unwanted attention of the bartender at The Penthouse—Jon had kept him up until after midnight reminiscing about “the old days.” While Bart certainly appreciated the free place to crash while he was in Manhattan, he was beginning to wonder if it was worth it, since the point of his getaway was to get away.

Okay, he thought, as he refilled his coffee mug, it was Wednesday, the second day of his brief vacation, and he was in Manhattan, which meant he could not—under any circumstance—spend the day in front of the television. And, to the extent he could avoid it, he would also try not to talk about work or work-related people.

He drained his coffee and walked to the shower, determined to make a vacation for himself.

“You shouldn’t have come.” Thus spoke Max Abraham.

“I had to come.”

Max shrugged. “Eh. So how’s life?”

“That’s not the big news here, is it?” Noah sat in the cold plastic chair next to his father’s bed. “How are you?”

Max raised one of his bushy eyebrows in his son’s direction. “My life continues. All in all, I suppose that’s big news. It’s certainly good news. For me, at least.”

Noah smiled as he watched that bushy eyebrow hiked up on his father’s forehead. For a moment, he wasn’t just Max Abraham, father, but Max Abraham, New York City icon. In his frequent eagerness to be his own man, Noah sometimes forgot that he also enjoyed his status as the son of one of New York’s most recognizable celebrities.

Max Abraham was one of the more flamboyant members of the New York City legal community. For several decades, he had represented actors, captains of industry, mob figures, cardinals, and politicians, and while it was true that his reputation for self-promotion exceeded that of his reputation for legal skills, he had managed to make untold millions of dollars in the process. Through pluck and nerve—and knowing when to call in the experts to shore himself up—he had managed to become so well known that not only was he a regular feature of the New York social scene, he was a recurring character on Saturday Night Live known as “Famous Lawyer Abe Maxham.” Pure coincidence, the show’s producers claimed, when Max threatened to sue. Pure coincidence…right down to those uncontrollable eyebrows.

Of course there had been no lawsuit. Max had bluffed, but would have never followed through. The Saturday Night Live parody validated his status as an iconic New Yorker, a status Max valued dearly. The lawsuit had been nothing more than a strategy to parley the SNL caricature into a few additional mentions on Page Six. It had worked—those things usually did—and even that morning as he rested in his hospital bed, Max was strategizing on how best to publicize his heart attack without scaring off potential clients.

“You gave us quite a scare,” Noah said.

“I gave you a scare?” Again, an eyebrow hoisted. “Let me tell you about scary, Noah. Scary is when you’re afraid your life might be determined by whether or not those asshole Manhattan drivers will get out of the way to let your ambulance up Third Avenue. That is scary.”

Noah laughed. His father had been guilty of many things over the years—bad parent, worse husband—but his sense of humor always bought him forgiveness.

“And anyway,” Max continued, “with a little luck I’ll be out of here in a few days.”

“You should get out of here. This hospital cramps your style.”

In truth, he thought his father didn’t look so bad for a man who had just suffered a heart attack and might undergo surgery. A bit pale and drawn, but that was understandable. Looking at him, Noah felt reassured that he would be around, making him crazy, for another couple of decades.

Max leaned toward Noah. “So tell me how the book is going.”

“It’s not.” Noah let out a long sigh. “No one wants to talk. Not on the record. And when they do talk, it’s…it’s sad. Self-loathing justifications for why they won’t come out, why they’d rather enable the enemy than—”

“Stop right there.” Max punctuated his command with a sweeping hand-gesture. “Who is the enemy?”

“Anti-gay politicians. The ones they usually work for.”

Despite his recent heart attack, the argumentative lawyer in Max began to take over.

“Define ‘anti-gay.’”

Max was good, but—on this topic—Noah knew he was better. He began ticking off legislation. “The Federal Marriage Amendment. ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ Um…opposition to AIDS funding and information. Equating homosexuality with bestiality and pedophilia…Do I have to go on?”

“You have some good examples, Noah. And I’m not arguing with you. But is everyone who supports ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ anti-gay?”

“Yes.”

“Bill Clinton was anti-gay?”

“That was different. He was forced—”

“Yes!” Max rose from his prone position, and Noah could almost see him in a suit and tie, gesturing to hold the attention of the jury, instead of lying in a pale blue hospital gown under an industrial-grade sheet. “Yes, Clinton was forced. But he did it. He conceded. And in the process he both lost a battle and a war.”

“If he didn’t, it would have been worse.”

“I’m not arguing with you against Clinton. Come on; you know that I’m friends with Bill and Hillary. Love them! All I’m saying is that you might want to remember that in politics, as in life, the palette has very little black and white, but a lot of shades of gray.”

“The world doesn’t look like that to me.”

He sighed. “You’re young.”

“Thirty-four. Almost thirty-five.”

“Young.” Max grabbed a glass of water from the bedside table, drank, and continued. “Gays are the new Jews. I think you should fight for equality, but I don’t think you should assume that everyone is going to get it, or that it’s going to be easy. Take it from a Jew born in the Holocaust era. To me, it’s insane to think that a lot of people didn’t ‘get it’ about Jews just a few generations ago. It’s better now…not perfect, but better. It will be better for you, too, but you have to realize that a lot of people—even a lot of gay people—are going to have a learning curve.”

Noah shook his head. “It had better be a steep curve. Most of us don’t want to wait, Dad.”

“Ah…” Max closed his eyes and slumped back against the pillow. “The impatience of youth.”

“I’m thirty-four,” Noah reminded him. Again.

“Youth. You will learn.”

Despite the fact that he had rushed two hundred miles to his bedside, Noah began to remember why they kept their distance from each other. Max Abraham was the ultimate negotiator, always willing to open with a compromise rather than stand on principle. Noah Abraham was someone altogether different. The only consolation, Noah thought, was that the negotiator and the idealist were mostly on the same side.

“How about,” Noah said, “we change the subject.”

His father smiled. “So I’m right?”

“Dad, I’m going to tell you that you’re right. You are one-hundred-percent correct. And do you know why I’m going to tell you that?”

“Because I just had a heart attack.”

“You are a very smart man.”

Max laughed. “Play to your advantages, then take the victory and don’t look back.”

This time Noah laughed along with the fleshy, temporarily grayish man with the bushy eyebrows and the salt-and-pepper hair who, by some accident of biology, was his father. And he realized that maybe they were more alike than he liked to think.

When the laughter faded, Max said, “I updated my will—”

Noah stopped him. “We’re not talking about that. You’ll probably outlive me. Let’s talk about something else. How has Tricia been holding up?”

Max shook his head. “It’s tough. She’s too young to…” He trailed off, realizing that the subject of Tricia’s age was a bit of a sore point for his son. “She’s doing all right. But why don’t you tell me what’s going on in your life. Are you still dating that architect?”

The architect would have been Harry. Noah and Harry had been more than “dating,” and Max knew it, but he couldn’t quite find the right words to advance a same-sex relationship to the next, more serious level.

And, in any event, Harry walked out of Noah’s life one year earlier and was never heard from again, which was hard to do in Washington, but he had managed it. After Harry was gone, Noah didn’t mourn; and he also didn’t feel compelled to cry about it to his family. He merely mentioned it during a phone call, almost as an after-thought. The breakup had been dismissed with the briefest of mentions and Noah—as he always did—moved on with his life. It was just one of those things that he had to put quickly and silently in the past.

Although now, with his father seemingly not even remembering the breakup, he wished he had made a slightly bigger deal over it.

“No. Harry and I split up.” He paused and added, “Quite some time ago.”

“Sorry. He seemed like a nice guy.” When Noah didn’t reply, he added, “Are you dating anyone now?”

“I’m taking a breather. There’s no rush, right?”

“Right.” There were a few moments of awkward silence until Max understood that his son was saying nothing more on the subject, then he scrambled for a new topic. “So…back to your book.”

Noah sighed. “I can’t see how I can possibly finish it. No one will talk on the record, and when they do talk, they don’t say anything. I wonder sometimes why they even bother talking to me.”

“Maybe they are talking to you. Maybe you’re just not listening.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You are the product of privilege, and you forget that sometimes. You’ve had a good life, but I’m not quite sure you appreciate exactly how good you’ve had it.” Blood was suddenly rushing to Noah’s head, but he decided to give his father a free pass for his heart attack and held his tongue.

Max continued. “Seriously. You’ve always had money and a roof. Don’t get me wrong; I was happy to provide them. And you were also privileged to be born into a family that accepted you, gay and all. How old were you? Seventeen?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty. Young. But you told me you were gay, and still you were accepted and supported.” He waved a steady finger in Noah’s direction. “Twenty years old, and you were out, gay, and proud, with the full support of your family and no financial worries. Do you think that’s the way it happens for everyone?”

“No. I know that I had it easier than a lot of people. But if people don’t come out—”

Max slumped back into the thin pillows, dismissing the argument before Noah had a chance to start it. “I know, I know. If people don’t come out, Bush and Cheney will think no one except for you and Rosie O’Donnell are gay and they’ll put you in camps. Blah, blah, blah.”

Blah, blah, blah? Had his father, the famous lawyer and occasional social activist Max Abraham, really just dismissed his fears, diminishing them to three nonsense syllables? A Jew born at a time when millions of Jews were being exterminated in Nazi camps? A man who lived through, and protested against, McCarthyism and segregation? This was the man who was telling him that he was unrealistic to expect gay men and lesbians to show their faces?

Noah suddenly wished they were still talking about Harry.

The silence following his comment lasted an uncomfortably long time, before Max finally—and correctly—said, “I think I’ve pissed you off.”

“A little.”

“Eh, maybe it’s good to get pissed off sometimes. Right?” Noah didn’t answer. “I’m sorry, but I’m a bit tired. I didn’t mean to cause a problem here. I was just trying to point out that it’s easier for some people—you, for example—to come out than it is for others.” Max looked at Noah and winked, and Noah thought, Did he wink? Yes, he winked! Which just pissed him off even more.

“You’re a good boy,” Max said. “You’ve got passion, and—most importantly—you are right. I hope you succeed. Just…try a little patience.”

Noah could understand why other lawyers ran when his father walked into a room, because he was by turns frustrating, charming, infuriating, friendly, maddening, self-deprecating, and, finally…well, he was Max Abraham. He did whatever he could to get your goat, then embraced you before you could hate him. And then, when all was forgiven, he would whip out the needle yet again.

In this case, though, Max Abraham was apparently going to wait for the needle, because he went for the dodge…although it was an understandable dodge.

He yawned.

“I hate to end such an…interesting discussion on this note, but I’m getting tired, and I want to save some energy for Tricia. You don’t mind?”

In fact, Noah was relieved. “No, I understand.”

“We’ll pick this up later, okay?”

“Okay.” Not that picking it up again was really necessary, but Noah knew his father wouldn’t let the conversation end until he had won the argument unequivocally. They had been down this road before.

Back safely in the waiting room, Noah sent Tricia in, knowing that Max needed to talk to a young person with a more pragmatic sensibility.

And Noah wasn’t that young person. He was just his son.

Noah sat in the waiting room while Tricia visited, mostly because he had nothing else to do at 1:30 in the afternoon in a city where he no longer lived. He made another feeble attempt to leaf through his notes, but, despite his father’s avid advocacy on their behalf, still couldn’t get inside the heads of the completelashuels.

Even as he stewed over his words, he knew he had to concede to his father one point: Max Abraham, as well as Noah’s mother, had made his coming-out process an easy one. Even in their liberal and generally secular precincts of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the family dynamics involved in announcing one was gay were usually fraught with fear and loathing, both internal and external. But that wasn’t Noah’s experience. Maybe it was the innate decency of his parents, he thought, or maybe it was their interactions with openly gay men and lesbians predating Stonewall. Or maybe it was the distance they placed in their relationship—even when Noah was a child—that allowed his parents to step back and look at him not as the end product of their commingled DNA, but as just another person, the way they would have barely raised an eyebrow upon learning the same news about a neighbor’s child. Whatever, he thought; the important thing was that after he gathered his courage and told his parents he was gay at twenty years of age, they had given him their support. The revelation didn’t necessarily make them any closer, but it wasn’t awkward, and it didn’t drive them apart.

It just…was.

In that sense, Noah knew—once again—that he was privileged. He wasn’t treated as an embarrassment, or even as the wayward son who was dating someone his parents didn’t like. He was treated the same way he had always been treated, and while that also left something to be desired, he had always believed that a person can’t miss something that they never had.

Still, he was perplexed. A lot of people faced bigger adversities than the completelashuels. But the complicity of the completelashuels in the great silence surrounding the lives of gay men and lesbians angered him. When they hid in their closets, and even worked against their own interests, they made people like Noah do all the work. They could feel safe celebrating a Friday Happy Hour at JR’s because he did their work for them, and helped free their lives in the hours they weren’t glued to both their desks and their self-denial.

In a sense, Noah felt he was working overtime to make their lives easier. And while Max Abraham had a hardworking son, he didn’t like working quite that hard.

He glanced at a clock on the generic white wall of the waiting room and was surprised to see that a half hour had passed. Tricia would be ending her visit soon, which meant that Noah would have to prepare himself for an afternoon of strained small talk with his father’s trophy wife. In his head, he began preparing topics, a task complicated by the fact that he really didn’t know his stepmother all that well. Max and Tricia had been married for five years, a period coinciding with his self-imposed exile in Washington. They really hadn’t had time to bond in the interim. This, Noah supposed, would have to be that time.

He ticked through possible small-talk topics in his head. Politics would be taboo, as would homosexuality. Family issues would also be verboten; the last thing Tricia needed to hear was a litany of his problems with her husband. However, her family was an option; Noah knew little about them, except that they were all still living a remarkably unremarkable existence in Buffalo. Of course, he also knew almost nothing about Buffalo, beyond snow, the Bills, and chicken wings, so if they had to go in that direction, Tricia would have to carry the conversation.

Since Noah had little interest in interior design, gardening, and social gossip—the usual interests of the Park Avenue Trophy Wife crowd—those topics were out. Pop culture could kill an hour, he thought, as long as she appreciated old movies and good theater. And the conversation would come to an abrupt end if she mentioned Mamma Mia or any boy bands. That was for certain.

He sighed. It was going to be an afternoon spent in light conversation about growing up in Buffalo. There was no way around it.

The squeaking wheels of a gurney snapped him out of his thoughts. Noah looked up to see the empty cot pass him, pushed by a short, cute, and very blond nurse. And since the nurse was also male, he offered a smile and received one in return.

Too damn easy, he thought, watching the nurse as he guided the gurney through the waiting room. The man gave him one last glance and smile as he left, and Noah returned to the Tricia dilemma.

It was not that Noah didn’t like Tricia. But his father was sixty-four, she was thirty-eight, and Noah was thirty-four. To Noah, it was…strange. Uncomfortable.

At least when his mother remarried she had the decency to marry someone who was only a decade younger. Sixty-four related to fifty-four much better than sixty-four related to thirty-eight. As the son who had to relate to all of those people, Noah considered that an undeniable truth. A stepmother who was basically his own age was just…wrong.

He looked again after the departed nurse, wondering if an afternoon assignation would be appropriate while his father was in a hospital bed, before deciding that, although it would be more fun than forced conversation with Tricia, it would also be tacky. Propriety was so unfair in this sort of circumstance.

Minutes later Tricia walked into the waiting room and, spotting Noah, motioned for him to join her. Wordlessly, he obeyed.

They walked the few blocks from the hospital to Max and Tricia Abraham’s Park Avenue apartment. The day was warm, the sidewalks were busy, and neither of them—lost in their own thoughts and not quite sure how to relate to one another outside of pleasant smiles and banal observations about the weather or the traffic—felt the need for conversation. When they reached the lobby of the white-brick building at the corner of East Seventy-third Street, Tricia excused herself to get the mail, which was as close as they came to conversation. Then, envelopes in her hand, they ascended in the elevator to the eleventh floor in silence.

Once inside the apartment, Noah dropped his bag in the foyer and awkwardly followed Tricia as she walked room to room, distractedly straightening things that didn’t need straightening. It had been a while since he had been home, Noah realized, and—as he had expected—Tricia had been busying herself redecorating. Almost certainly through his father’s influence, there was now a lot of leather in the apartment: couch, armchairs…even the padding at the edges of a set of end tables. He felt it made the large living room seem more closed and intimate, although the light curtains on the large south-facing windows and the tasteful use of flowers were clearly Tricia’s efforts to soften the testosterone-driven room.

Tricia walked into the kitchen, all modern and metallic, filled with appliances Noah couldn’t begin to identify, which uniformly bore the logos of what appeared to be an array of German and Swedish firms. It was only when she reached the refrigerator that she finally asked him, “Are you going to follow me everywhere for the next few days?”

He blushed. “Uh…I just thought you might need help.”

“What I need,” she said, opening up the refrigerator, “is a glass of wine.” She took an uncorked white wine bottle from the shelf inside the door. “Care to join me?”

“Sure,” he said, impulsively trying to forge a bond with her even though he really didn’t feel like having a drink, especially so early in the afternoon.

She poured two glasses, offered him one, and motioned to the living room, where they sat an appropriate distance apart. She took the leather couch; he took one of the leather chairs.

“A lot of leather,” Noah said, stumbling in his effort to come up with an ice-breaker.

“It was your father’s idea. Obviously. Although I’ve come to like it. We bought the furniture last year, and I guess he was in a particularly masculine frame of mind. Take this leather, throw in a bunch of red meat, add a high-pressure legal practice, and I guess you’ve proven your manhood without having to embarrass yourself with a mistress or a shiny red sports car.” She looked at Noah and smiled. “You see? It was easier to get used to the leather than worry about the mistress.”

It had never before crossed his mind that Tricia had been his father’s mistress before she was his wife. But now it had, and he couldn’t shake the thought. He wished she hadn’t brought up his father’s apparent recent need to reaffirm his masculinity, because it made him realize that his father had had decades in which to go through several midlife crises.

“So how is your mother?” she asked, moving the topic of conversation from one area of discomfort to another.

“Fine. She’s…fine.”

“I’ve always liked her.”

Noah twitched. Did his father’s third wife really just say something nice about his father’s first wife? How would they have even—?

“We were both on a benefit committee for the Whitney a few years ago,” she said, anticipating his reaction and, in fact, seeming to enjoy it. “So how does she like living in Florida?”

“Fine.” He paused. “Just fine.”

Noah’s relationship with his mother was, if possible, even more complex than his relationship with his father. Divorced from Max just a few years after Noah was born, Frieda Feldman Abraham took her substantial settlement and started life anew, reborn as an Upper West Side social activist. Even as he was unable to shed it, he knew that his resentment about having been given everything too easily came directly from the mouth of his mother. While he never disliked his mother for that, he always felt wary and guilty in her presence. And he also wasn’t sorry she had moved to Florida.

Also, he didn’t like the way she ate her salad. That poke-poke-poking at each individual lettuce leaf made him want to scream sometimes.

Noah shook his head. “It’s just sort of strange. I mean, my mother knowing my stepmother…”

Tricia wagged a finger in front of his face. “We’ve had this conversation before, haven’t we?”

It took Noah a few seconds to understand what she meant, but then he remembered.

“Sorry. I mean, ‘my mother knowing my father’s wife.’ Better?”

“Much,” she said, offering no further information. Several times in the past she had warned him away from the word “stepmother” without explanation, and Noah now knew better than to ask. It was her title, so she had the right to be called what she wanted to be called, even if Noah felt that calling her “his father’s wife” added even more distance to an already distant relationship.

They sat—uncomfortable among the leather-laden comfort—for a long stretch of the mid-afternoon, vaguely looking out the window at the sliver of blue between the buildings, sipping wine, and wishing for easy conversation. Finally, Noah remembered his prepared topic.

“So your family…They’re in Buffalo?”

After a half hour or so listening to what he came to think of as the Chronicles of Buffalo, conversation again wound down. Noah excused himself and, finally collecting his bag from the foyer, walked down a picture-lined hallway to the guest bedroom.

He was pleased to see that his former bedroom had not been leatherized in the redecorating process. In fact, the room retained a number of distinctly feminine touches. It was light and airy, the walls a periwinkle blue and the furniture spare and unimposing.

He tossed his bag at the foot of the bed, then tossed himself on top of the off-white comforter, where he tried unsuccessfully to nap. He stayed there for a long time, wondering how he could escape and where he could escape to.

A natural loner, Noah was not one of those people who prided themselves on collecting large numbers of close friends. He had a few friends—acquaintances, really—in Washington he could call when he really needed to get out of the apartment, but otherwise he was quite content to be on his own. His life had been quite similar when he lived in New York, but in the intervening years he had lost contact with his old crowd. He was now alone in Manhattan, and unless he went out by himself, he would be a prisoner of Park Avenue until it was time to go back to Washington and again face the hopelessness of The Project.

There were always museums, movies, and theater, but he couldn’t think of them as solitary activities. Like dining alone in a restaurant, Noah felt uncomfortable flying solo at venues where everyone else came in multiples. Wandering the city might kill some time, but Noah had no great desire to wander.

He tossed and turned on the bed for what felt like quite a while longer, mulling his undesirable options and weighing them against the alternative, which was uncomfortable boredom. When he finally looked at the clock on the nightstand, only fifteen minutes had passed.

“Fuck,” he muttered to himself. It was going to be a long visit. Even if he left the following day, it was going to be a long visit.

And because of those thoughts, he was actually grateful when he heard Tricia knock lightly on the guest room door.

“Come in,” he called out, turning slightly to face her as she eased the door open.

“Are you as bored as I am?” she asked.

He blushed. Was it that obvious?

“Well…you know, it’s not my house, and I didn’t bring a book, so I’m sort of…” He smiled. “Yeah, I guess I’m a bit bored. Uh…no offense.”

It was her turn to smile. “None taken. But I was thinking we should do something.”

“Something…? Something like what?”

She frowned. “Anything to get out of this house. I’ve barely had a breath of fresh air since your father went into the hospital, and once he comes home…well, I might as well forget about having a life for a while.”

“But the doctors said he’ll be back to normal in no time.”

She blew a wisp of stray blond hair out of her eyes. “They always say things like that, but it never quite works that way. Your father was lucky, but he’s still going to need some time to recuperate. Especially with his personality. If he were a laid-back, calm man, it would be a lot easier. But he’s going to have to make an effort to relax, and I’m afraid there’s going to be a lot of stress around here.”

“Hire him a nurse.”

She laughed. “I can’t even keep a cleaning lady. Five years of marriage and not one has ever done a good enough job…according to him, that is. So let’s forget about getting a nurse, because I’ll be spending more time interviewing than he’ll be spending recuperating.”

Noah knew she spoke the truth. “So what do you want to do?” he asked, vaguely fearing something worse than boredom.

“I was thinking a bar.”

That caught him by surprise. He thought she had been setting him up for a long dinner at whichever Upper East Side bistro was currently in vogue among the Park Avenue Trophy Wife set. Perhaps the glass of wine early in the afternoon should have been a warning to him. “His father’s wife” had, in the course of just a few hours, surprised him several times: she might have been a mistress, and she might be a lush. Noah decided that he should neither dismiss her nor underestimate her.

He glanced at the clock on his nightstand.

“It’s only four o’clock,” he announced. “Isn’t it a bit early?”

“Why, Noah! I didn’t know you were such a stick-in-the-mud!” Tricia leaned against the door frame. “Never heard of Happy Hour?”

He was wary. “I’ve heard of it.”

“I want to go.” She affected a pout. “Take me out to Happy Hour.”

“You are a very strange stepmother.”

An index finger wagged in his direction. “Ah-ah!”

“Sorry. You are a very strange wife-of-my-father.”

To which, she said simply, “Thank you,” and—with a toss of her hair—left to change into more appropriate attire.