Читать книгу Men Who Love Men - William J. Mann - Страница 8

Back home, I pop open the refrigerator door and stare inside, contemplating dinner. There’s one thing, at least, that I can be grateful for.

There will be no more green peppers in the tuna fish.

I don’t like green peppers. Or peppers of any color for that matter. Why anyone would want to put green peppers in tuna salad is beyond my comprehension. But Joey did, and when Joey made my lunch I always had to pick them out or swallow them whole with my milk.

Now that I’m alone, I make my own meals. Every single one of them. And most of the time, I eat them alone, too.

I remove a bowl of tuna salad—pepper free—and start picking at it with a spoon. Alice in Chains’ Dirt is playing on my stereo. A paean to isolation, in my opinion, and therefore rather fitting for my mood.

Outside, below my window, I hear a gaggle of boys heading back to their guesthouses after Tea Dance. Cautiously, I peer down at them. They’re a little drunk—or tweaked—or maybe just high on life, laughing in that way only gay boys can laugh when they’re together in their little posses. Testosterone-driven girlishness, if such a thing is possible. Their laughter is high-pitched, grating and giddy, but aggressive and sensual, too, their eyes bouncing off passersby like rubber balls. One of the boys, a shirtless dark Latino with a goatee and abs for days, catches sight of me eating my tuna fish at the window. I look away quickly, letting the curtain fall back in front of me.

I lied to Luke. No one was waiting here for me to meet. No one but my bowl of tuna salad—which will serve as my dinner this Saturday night, when most everyone else in Provincetown is heading out to fabulous meals at fabulous restaurants looking absolutely fabulous. As for me, I’m happy to be able to call it an early night—one of the benefits of tricking in the afternoon. I’m able to curl up on the couch and watch Leave it to Beaver and Bewitched on TV Land.

The problem with such early evening hibernation, however, is the sun. If only it would get dark, I could pretend it was just a Tuesday night in March, a night when you can go to bed early and alone without feeling you’re missing out on the party. But here it is, the hands on the clock already passing eight, and the sky remains defiantly bright. I can’t escape the fact that the night is young, very young. But not for me.

There was a time, and not so long ago, that I’d be out there with those boys, laughing in that same high-pitched way, ogling passersby and gearing up for adventures to come. But ever since Joey left, I just haven’t had the drive, the spunk, to get out there and play the game. Neither have I had the body. Already I’m thinking about that half-eaten carton of Chunky Monkey ice cream in the freezer, the tuna salad quickly losing whatever minimal appeal it may have had. That’s how I’ll spend my night, eating ice cream and mouthing along as Endora casts campy spells on Bewitched.

Alone.

All my friends tell me I’m so young and that being alone for a while after a breakup isn’t fatal. It might even be a good thing, they say. But they don’t understand that just when you think you’ll never have to be alone again, and then suddenly you are, no amount of reason can blunt the shock of seeing one toothbrush in the bathroom.

But it’s the middle of the night that’s the worst part. Those moments when I wake up at four a.m. and wonder in the stillness what it is that’s wrong. And then it hits me.

Joey’s gone.

Fuck, they’re all gone. Joey and Daniel and Shane—and though Lloyd might be right downstairs, he’s gone, too.

Every time I have fallen in love, I’ve been convinced it would last forever. That this would be the man with whom I’d buy a house, make out a will, take my last breath. We’d die just minutes apart, holding hands in the same bed. How romantic would that be? And of course, we’d be buried side by side. HERE LIES HENRY WEINER AND HIS HUSBAND, THEIR HEARTS UNITED TOGETHER FOREVER.

Forever. It’s a fascinating concept. What’s forever for me, of course, would only be a heartbeat for the Galapagos land tortoise, which the Discovery Channel has taught me can live up to two hundred years. Given the number of boyfriends I’ve already had in my thirty-three years upon this planet, I must say I’m glad humans don’t have the lifespans of tortoises. There’s no way I could keep getting my hopes up for another sixteen decades only to watch them get dashed over and over and over again.

And yet, for a very brief time, I wasn’t alone.

Why has my short time with Joey become so imbued with the rosy romantic glow of nostalgia? I remember with such longing the day we met at Tea Dance, the euphoria after the first time we made love, the sense of future and forever in the air. When things started getting serious between Joey and me, I moved into his apartment on Commercial Street. I needed some space away from the guesthouse. I’m the manager here, after all, Lloyd’s right-hand man—and Joey knew that for a while, a brief and crazy time, I’d fancied myself in love with Lloyd. Obviously it wouldn’t do to go on living here, so instead, I moved in into Joey’s cramped little two-room apartment over a seafood restaurant in the center of town.

Yet no matter its limitations, I adored living at Joey’s place. The harbor, sunkissed and blue, was always sparkling outside our window, and I found I actually liked picking up Joey’s socks and underwear from the floor and depositing them in the hamper. I liked doing things for him. His laundry. His ironing and vacuuming.

But there was one thing Joey didn’t like about me. My dog. Back then, I had a little pug named Clara. She was so ugly she was adorable. She belonged first to my friend Brent, and I took her in after Brent died. But Joey didn’t like dogs, and didn’t want a dog running around his apartment, so I gave Clara away to a couple of lesbians who promised her a good home. It’s a decision I’ve never stopped feeling guilty about. I chose Joey over Clara. A boy I’d known for only a little over a month instead of my faithful companion of several years. I’m sure the lesbians made good on their promise to provide well for her, but a day hasn’t gone by when I don’t regret giving up Clara.

And what made it worse, of course, was that soon Joey was gone too. I’ll never forget the night it ended. I was making dinner. Joey entered sullenly, his jacket over his shoulder, tie askew, briefcase in hand. He’d been hired by a real estate company in town, and should have been a dazzling success. The market in Provincetown was at its hottest during that time, and Joey had big dreams. Yet so far he hadn’t even sold a single condo. Everyone else around him was raking in the cash, but Joey kept coming up short.

Looking at him that night, I could see it had been a particularly disappointing day. I waited for the kiss, for the little nuzzle of his nose on my cheek to which I’d grown accustomed. But nothing came. Joey went straight to the bathroom to take a shower.

In the living room, I set up two folding TV trays and lit a candle. Joey came in, towel drying his hair, the smell of Ivory soap lingering around his body. His straight black Asian hair, electrified, fell into his eyes. He flipped on the television.

“Just for the news, okay?” he asked, seeming to want to keep conversation at a minimum. I nodded.

We talked little during dinner. Afterward, Joey washed the dishes. Usually if I cooked, he cleaned up. This time, I helped, scraping the plates.

Then we settled down to watch Jeopardy. It was just like any night. After the show was over, I expected that we’d have sex, and then maybe head out to the Wave bar to see who was around. Maybe we’d have a cocktail. Or maybe two, given Joey’s mood. But before the game show ended, Joey suddenly flicked off the set with the remote control. The abrupt silence in the room choked me. My toes curled up in my sneakers.

“I can’t go on,” he said, and I knew instantly what he meant. He didn’t mean his job, he didn’t mean this place, he didn’t mean anything but me—he couldn’t go on with me. It was as if, the whole time we’d been together, I’d just been waiting for this moment. It always came. It was inevitable.

Still, I tried to reason my way out of it. “Shouldn’t this be something we decide together?” I asked. In my first reaction to Joey’s decision, I was calm, rational, mature.

But all Joey did was shake his head and tell me he had fallen out of love with me, the cruelest phrase in the universe.

“So,” I said, my rationality beginning to crumble, “you want me just to pack my things and go?”

“You can stay here if you want,” he said, his eyes closed against me. “For tonight.”

He headed off to bed. I watched him walk down the hall. Then I placed myself stubbornly in front of the television set, snapping it back to life, refusing to turn it off until the early hours of the morning. It was as if by keeping the night going I could keep the relationship from ending. When I finally gave up and joined Joey in the bedroom, his eyes were closed, but his breathing didn’t have the usual rhythm of sleep.

Crawling into bed next to him, as I’d done so many times before, I knew I’d never fall asleep that night. I just lay there, feeling his warmth and watching the changing moonlight on the ceiling. I dreaded the sun, because then it would be over. All of this—our time together—over. When the first slivers of orange slipped between the Venetian blinds, making horrible stripes across the bed, I wanted to run outside, like a cartoon I’d once seen, and push the sun back down behind the horizon like a basketball.

Without a word, Joey got up. I reached over and pressed his pillow against my face, savoring his smell. I thought maybe that I’d just get up as usual, grind the coffee beans, bring in the paper, pour our juices. I’d pretend he never said what he did. Let him throw me out! But instead I rose, scuffed over to the closet, and gathered a few shirts and a pair of pants.

Joey cried only once. I stood in front of him, slowly removing his keys from my key ring. One by one I handed them to him. The apartment key, the downstairs door key, the laundry room key. When he had them all, he began to sob. I walked out.

For a moment, I was afraid I’d handed him my car key, but then I found it, still safely on the ring. The ignition started my tears again, and I drove back here, to Nirvana, and let myself in. I expected Lloyd, but I found Jeff, and I made sure I’d dried my eyes when he saw me. Still, I never could fool Jeff.

“What’s wrong, Henry?” he asked.

I told him it was over with Joey. His face wrinkled in compassion for me.

“Are most of your things still back there?” Jeff asked.

“My whole life is still back there,” I told him.

He scolded me for being melodramatic. But still he wrapped his arms around me, and I was grateful for them.

And so I moved back in above the guesthouse. When I found one of Clara’s toys under the refrigerator, I sobbed for two days.

I should have known I’d end up back here.

It’s where I always end up.

Back with Jeff and Lloyd.

When I lived in Boston, some of the guys in the clubs would call me “Henry O’Brien,” because they didn’t know my real last name and because, after all, I was just an appendage to the popular Jeff O’Brien, traipsing along behind him on the dance floor, always to be spotted somewhere hovering in his backlight. Here in Provincetown, some of the townies even today know me only as “Henry, Lloyd’s manager,” because, after all, that’s who I am here, the manager of Lloyd Griffith’s popular guesthouse.

Without Joey, Henry Weiner exists only in reference to Jeff or Lloyd.

The siren song of the Chunky Monkey in the freezer finally wins out. Without even thinking about it, I’m lured over to the refrigerator, and it’s with the first spoonful into my mouth that Jeff catches me. He barges into my apartment without knocking.

“What are you, Kramer?” I ask, annoyed. “What if I was in here with a trick?”

“From the looks of it, your only tricks tonight are named Ben and Jerry.” Jeff’s all smiles, as if he has good news. “I thought you were trying to lose weight.”

I toss the ice cream into the sink. It was getting crystallized anyway. “For your information, bucko,” I tell Jeff, still a little pissed, “I already tricked today. A very hot boy I met at Tea Dance. Ask your sister. She saw him.”

“Yeah, yeah, she told me. Good for you. But come downstairs, okay? Lloyd and I have been waiting for you to get back. We have something to tell you.”

I look over at him. What is it about Jeff O’Brien? He’s forty now, maybe even forty-one—he’s always been cagey about his age—but people still sometimes think he’s younger than I am. That’s because, unlike mine, Jeff’s hair hasn’t started to recede. Nor does any fleshy excess mar Jeff’s middle. He maintains the same strict gym routine we both kept during our days on the circuit. Of course, Jeff has always known a few shortcuts to looking good. He buys his T-shirts one size too small and has his jeans taken up in the seat to make his butt look more perky. And I suspect an occasional injection of Botox from Ann Marie’s dermatologist boss might explain why Jeff’s forehead is still as smooth as a nineteen-year-old’s. He argues that he keeps up appearances simply because a hot author pic sells books. Who am I to question success? Certainly I’m no expert at it.

I think again about Luke, and the copy of Jeff’s book under his bed. I decide against telling him.

“What’s the big news?” I ask.

Jeff winks at me. “We’ll tell you when you come down.”

He’s back out the door. I can hear his steps on the staircase, fast and happy. He’s probably signed another book contract. Good for him. The bounty never ends for Jeff O’Brien.

I turn to the sink to rinse the ice cream down the drain when my cell phone rings. The caller ID shows a wireless number with an area code I don’t recognize. Normally I just let calls I don’t recognize go to voice-mail—but for some reason I answer this one.

“Henry?” comes the voice at the other end.

“Yeah.”

“Hey, it’s Luke.”

“No way,” I say, smiling despite myself, my words ahead of my brain. “I was just thinking of—”

Bad. Very bad. Never admit right off that you were thinking of somebody. I learned that much from Jeff. Play aloof. Make them do the work.

Luke seems pleased. “Of me? Really? You were thinking of me?”

“Well,” I explain, “of my shirt. I left my shirt in your room.”

He laughs. “Isn’t the fact that you’re wearing mine an even exchange?”

“It’s not really a big deal—”

“We can make the switch tomorrow.” I can hear Luke blowing smoke from his cigarette. “I was thinking maybe we could hang out.”

So you can meet Jeff. “Well,” I say, regaining my stride, “tomorrow’s kind of busy for me…”

“I really enjoyed meeting you, Henry. Can I call you in the morning?”

“Like I said, tomorrow is kind of busy…”

“But can I just call and see if things lighten up for you? I’d really like to see you again, Henry. Maybe we can just, you know, get together for a little while?”

This is one pushy kid. I should just say no, end it right here. But instead I say, “Yeah, okay. Call me tomorrow afternoon.”

“Awesome. Talk to you tomorrow, Henry.” And he hangs up.

I smirk. By tomorrow Luke will have met someone else, probably some hot boy closer to his own age, either on the dance floor at the A House or on the steps of Spiritus Pizza, and he’ll have forgotten all about me.

Unless, of course, he still wants to meet Jeff badly enough.

“Henry!” Jeff hollers up the stairs. “Are you coming?”

I head down. “I had a call,” I tell him as I enter the guesthouse’s common area. “This may be hard for you to accept, Jeff, but I do have a life of my own. Sometimes your beck and call has to wait.”

Jeff just smirks. “Oh, Lloyd, our boy is feeling rebellious tonight.”

“We do appreciate you coming down, Henry,” Lloyd says from the bar. He comes around from behind, carrying a bottle of champagne and three glasses.

“Well,” I say, “I guess this really is a celebration. What’s the big news?”

“Don’t rush things,” Jeff says, settling himself onto the couch and propping his feet up on the coffee table. “We need the proper mood.”

Lloyd sets the bottle and the glasses down and softens the light. I sit in a chair opposite Jeff, wondering what this is all about. It’s more than just a book deal. It concerns Lloyd, too. I watch him move across the room to the front desk, where he turns off the ringer on the phone. Lloyd might not be as put together as Jeff, but he still looks damn good for his fourth decade as well. Buzzed head, a sexy soul patch of hair below his lower lip, a tattoo of a dragonfly on his well-rounded shoulder. He’s wearing a white ribbed tank top and low-rise jeans, and for a moment my mind flickers back to sex with him, as those green eyes hovered above me, those lips softly touching mine…

“Okay,” Lloyd says, breaking my reverie as he plops down on the couch next to Jeff, putting his arm around his lover’s shoulders. “You want to tell him or should I?”

“Tell me what?” I ask, sitting forward, finding myself getting anxious, despite the happy grins and the bottle of champagne waiting to be opened.

Jeff holds my eyes. “We’re getting married,” he says.

I look from him over to Lloyd.

“The middle of next month,” Lloyd adds.

“I know it’s not far away,” Jeff says, “but we want it to coincide with the anniversary of the day we met.”

“So we can keep the same anniversary,” Lloyd says.

“And Henry,” Jeff says. “We want you to be our best man.”

The words haven’t fully penetrated my mind. “Married,” I say.

“Yeah, one hundred percent legal,” Jeff exults. “After sixteen years I’m finally gonna make an honest man out of him.”

They giggle like schoolgirls.

“Married,” I say again.

“Well, what do you think?” Lloyd asks.

“Well,” I say, unsure of my thoughts, “I didn’t think marriage was something you’d be interested in.” Years of political pontificating from Jeff and Lloyd come flooding back to me, their endless rant against the status quo. “I mean, marriage is a failed heterosexual institution, isn’t it? You’ve both called it that.”

“Sure it is,” Jeff says, “but maybe we homos can improve on the formula.” He’s beaming like a jack o’lantern.

“But,” I say, feeling the need to somehow challenge them, “you both have always rejected the whole marriage thing. I mean, when have you guys ever been monogamous?”

“Why does monogamy have to go part and parcel with marriage?” Lloyd asks. “That’s part of how we can improve on the formula. After all, haven’t Jeff and I shown, after sixteen years, that you can have a lasting commitment without being monogamous?”

“Oh, come on,” I say, surprised at how antagonistic I’m feeling. But I can’t help myself. “You guys haven’t been together for sixteen years. Not really. You’ve had your share of ups and downs. There have been big chunks of time when you’ve been apart, when you haven’t known how to define yourselves. I know. I was there.”

“That’s why we want you as our best man, Henry,” Lloyd says simply. “We’ve been through a lot together. You know us better than anyone.”

The smile has faded from Jeff’s face. I can tell he’s annoyed that I’m not jumping for joy. Indeed, I’m surprised myself. Why am I being such a putz? Why am I not thrilled? Why am I not throwing my arms around the two of them, congratulating them? Jeff and Lloyd are my best friends!

“Henry,” Jeff says, talking to me patiently, as if he were addressing a child, “what marriage offers Lloyd and me is a public acknowledgement of our relationship. After all, I had to show up for three—count ‘em—three of my brother’s weddings, even though each one of them was a disaster and everyone knew it from the start. Now he can show up for mine—which, by the way, has lasted longer than all three of his put together.”

I make a face. “So that’s why you’re getting married? To get even with your family? To force some kind of acknowledgement from them?”

Jeff holds my gaze. “That’s one reason, yes. That’s the reason anyone gets married. So that the world can see and recognize and affirm their relationship. Finally the state is giving gay people that same opportunity.”

“Henry,” Lloyd asks, “are you not happy for us?”

“Well, of course I’m happy for you,” I manage to say. “Don’t get me wrong.”

“It sure doesn’t seem that way,” Jeff says, clearly peeved. “Maybe we ought to skip the champagne.”

“No, we’re not skipping the champagne,” Lloyd says. “I’m going to pop the cork as soon as Henry gives us his answer.”

I frown. “My answer to what?”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me.” Lloyd smiles kindly and finds my eyes. “We’re asking you to be our best man.”

Once, years ago, during one of those in-between, questioning periods for Jeff and Lloyd, I had allowed myself to imagine Lloyd asking me a very different question. I had imagined him asking me to marry him, or at least to join him in a committed relationship. Of course, it was folly, and deep down, I knew it. Jeff was always the one Lloyd loved. But still I allowed myself, however briefly, to dream. And now, instead of asking me to marry him, Lloyd was asking me to be his best man.

I gaze into his eyes, then look over at Jeff, who’s looking back at me.

“You are hopelessly enmeshed with those two,” Joey once told me. “You want Lloyd and you want to be Jeff.”

I shrugged him off, but an earlier boyfriend, Shane, had once made a very similar statement. “Henry,” Shane had said, handing me back my keys in a manner not so different from the way I’d later hand Joey his, “you won’t be able to really love anyone until you learn to love yourself.”

I had sighed. “Please, Shane. Can we end this without psychoanalysis?”

“No, we can’t,” Shane insisted, in the way only Shane could insist. “The problem is that you are always defining yourself against either Jeff or Lloyd, and in your estimation, you always come up short.”

Shane was smart. Of all my boyfriends, he probably knew me best. He saw through everything. He’d met me, in fact, on the dance floor with Jeff, and saw up close and personal my early infatuation with him. That I once worshipped Jeff and everything about him was obvious. Just by asking me to dance one night, Jeff O’Brien had changed my life. I’d been a skinny computer geek in my early twenties who’d always watched Jeff from afar, and when one night he’d looked over and extended his hand to me, I couldn’t believe my luck. Jeff O’Brien—he of the blue eyes and six-pack and bubble butt—was asking me to dance.

And though we never had sex, Jeff dubbed me his “sister” and took me under his wing. Henry Weiner only really came alive under Jeff O’Brien’s tutelage. Jeff got me to the gym. He taught me how to dress. He allowed me to tag along with him in the days when the gay party circuit was at its height. Off we’d fly to San Francisco and Palm Springs and Chicago and Atlanta and Montreal, and in Jeff’s afterglow, I was transformed. He became, in the words of Shane, my own personal deity. Despite the fact that my grandfather had been a rabbi, I’d never believed in God—until Jeff came along.

It was a pretty heady time, I admit. How thrilling, how completely new, was the experience of being looked at, of being able to take off my shirt at Gay Pride and get barked at by hot boys. I got so buff, in fact, I discovered there were guys who were willing to pay good money just to touch—and maybe lick a little—so, for a time, I was an escort. Jeff called me the Happy Hooker. But I didn’t stay happy for long. Despite all the attention, I felt lonely. Instead of making me feel more special, hustling eventually made me feel pretty worthless. Enter Lloyd Griffith.

It was, of course, inevitable that I’d meet Lloyd through Jeff, and in the gaze of those soft green eyes, a different sort of fascination emerged. Lloyd had spent many years as a psychologist, though when I met him he was transitioning to his new career running his Provincetown guesthouse. Still, Lloyd knew very well how to zero in on one’s core issues. He helped me to see that my whole life was ego—not just in my need to be physically admired, but in my constant search for external affirmation. By going within—which we did, in long, intimate meditation sessions at sunrise in the stillness of Beech Forest—I was able to find some internal peace and satisfaction. Then, after a sacred sex workshop, we had incredibly passionate sex, and that pushed me over the edge of bliss. In no time at all, I was head over heels in love with Dr. Lloyd Griffith.

Of course, the feelings for Lloyd went exactly nowhere, and I was soon back to doing what I do best: being alone. I stopped going to the gym. Ice cream became a substitute for all the sex I’d been having. There were brief flickers of hope—named Daniel, named Joey—but always I ended up back in my little apartment above Nirvana watching Good Times on TV Land. When I started responding to ideas with shouts of “Dy-no-mite!” Jeff issued a moratorium on seventies TV shows for a month. I cheated. I was back to J.J. and Maude and Fred Sanford in a week and a half.

And despite all I’d learned from Lloyd about ego, I can’t deny that I’ve come to miss some of that old external affirmation. Sure, I still try to meditate, and sometimes I still practice little rituals like saying, “I love you, you are good” to my reflection in the mirror. But there’s something about a guy coming up to you on the dance floor, running his finger down your torso, tasting your sweat and telling you, “You oughta bottle this stuff,” that just makes your day.

Yes, I know all this dependence on my ego to feel good about myself once ensured my downfall. But here’s the thing: I spent too many years on the sidelines to go happily into retirement. My time at the ball just wasn’t long enough. I had, what? Three years? Four at the most. Jeff might be able to sit in on a Saturday night baking brownies and watching old Bette Davis movies with Lloyd and a bunch of lesbian friends—but he had a good fifteen years out there! I’m not ready to fade away like that.

Is that the reason I’m being so resistant to the idea of Jeff and Lloyd getting married? Because the idea of settled domesticity unnerves me? Because I don’t want that to be me, curled up on a couch eating brownies, getting fatter, becoming more and more forgotten by the boys on the dance floor?

No, that’s not it. I’d be only too happy to go that route if it was Lloyd next to me.

Or anyone, for that matter.

I’d give anything to have what they have, to not be alone.

Marriage. What a strange concept. I grew up never thinking marriage was an option for me. For my sisters, yes. For other people around me. But not for little gay Henry Weiner. In some ways, never having to think about marriage made things easier. You didn’t have to worry about not finding the absolutely right person because, after all, there was nothing that legally kept you together. Now, as I watch all those happy faces on television—all those happy gay faces running down to apply for marriage licenses across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—it just underscores how alone I really am. Am I for gay marriage? Maybe—if I could find someone who wanted to marry me.

See, here’s the thing. When the state Supreme Court ruled that the state had to allow gay couples to marry, I just never thought Jeff and Lloyd would be among the throng who scampered down to Town Hall. They’ve never been the type for convention of any kind. They make great shows of rejecting old, failed paradigms—like monogamy, they say. But here they are, sitting across from me like two little high school lovebirds. Be happy for us, their faces are pleading.

Be our best man.

Best man.

What a strange turn of a phrase.

How can one feel best when one doesn’t even feel all that good?

“Well?” Lloyd is asking.

I take a deep breath.

“Of course,” I say.

Lloyd is up off the couch in an instant, his arms encircling me. Jeff doesn’t move quite as fast, but he comes over, too, tousling my hair. “Thanks, buddy,” he says. “You’ll look grand in a tux.”

“Tux?” I look up at him as Lloyd moves off to uncork the champagne. “It’s going to be that formal?”

“Sure thing. All the trimmings. It’ll be the event of the season.”

I smirk. So that’s part of the motivation, too. Since Jeff’s become a success, he likes to put on a good show. I can only imagine who he’s getting for entertainment.

“We’re bringing in Connie Francis,” he tells me, as if reading my mind. “You know, ‘Where the Boys Are.’ I met her in New York a few weeks ago and we got to be friends. I’d like to get Kimberley Locke, too—you know, this year’s second runner-up on Idol. I met her at the Abbey in West Hollywood last month.”

“Cat,” Lloyd says, using Jeff’s nickname, “let’s not make this into a three-ring circus.” He’s pouring the bubbly into three glasses.

“Hey, it’s our wedding. A once-in-a-lifetime event. Let’s do it up!”

Lloyd hands me a glass of champagne. “I just can’t imagine the two of you, married,” I say. “Legally and everything. Until death do us part and all that traditional mumbo jumbo.”

“Happens to the best of us,” Jeff says.

The best of us.

But not the best man.

I figure I ought to offer a toast. “To the two of you,” I say, not sure where I’m going with this. “To…what moments lie ahead.” Not very romantic, I suppose, but the best I can muster.

We clink glasses. We drink.

The loneliest sip of champagne I’ve ever had.