A wedding in the sky - Short Story

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Michael Klein

Do I have to have had sex with them?" I asked, dreamily.

"No, it can be anyone you know," J. T. assured me. We were talking about ceremonial love. Who would we marry, if we could marry any man in the world? John was someone I suspected had just fallen in love with a close friend again. John was known for falling in love with friends. I used to fall in love with friends, which is how I know about John. It's a connection--something we talk about as soon as the infatuation for somebody falls away.

I fell in love with my friend Bobby in the middle of a New Year's Day kiss during a drive to a beach in Truro. The kiss was solid proof of something in the air a year before, when I had first fallen for Bobby, after he wandered into an A. A. meeting, broken-spirited--a rumpled, beautiful character out of a Dostoevsky novel. It was winter and he was bundled on the outside, but when he took off his heavy gray wool overcoat, he looked like summer--T-shirt, shorts--someone dressed for a dream. And like a dreamer, I figured that he was probably slightly insane. But he seemed so open-eyed and inquisitive about the sea that glittered outside the window that I was drawn to him, or his energy, or something in the room that wasn't there until he was. I was attracted to what drew him--the sea, the men huddled around the coffee maker. Besides, I think I've always been drawn to men who don't dress for the weather--who are in the world, but not wholly of the world; whom the world seems to interrupt with weather. My first boyfriend in high school used to wear flip-flops--accommodating them for the cold by merely adding a pair of socks.

Bobby and I used to meet every Monday night in my little studio on Atkins Lane in Provincetown, and I cooked pasta and vegetables while he talked about his acting career gone bust in New York City. He'd come to Provincetown to find sobriety. Something in the anguish of city life and the harried rhythm of people trying to succeed made him too anxious to try anything like achieving peace without a drink in his hand. He didn't know, yet, I don't think, that living by the sea wouldn't automatically give him sobriety. But there are days when the sea can look like being sober--calm, with the old terror underneath.

One Monday, Bobby and I were wrestling on my bed. I was playing that kind of unconscious game most men play together sometime during life--something on the same order as the towel snapping locker room game or pat on the ass game--touching another man in a way that is never actually read as sexual, although it is, in a way, only sexual. I touched Bobby's chest and stomach through his inappropriate clothing and named his chest and stomach. I named his arm and inner thigh. And when I casually lay my hand across his crotch, I decided to let him name it.

Bobby whispering: "... And that's Bobby's penis." But this wasn't love, yet. Not sexual love, anyway. I think this was the kind of falling in a heap gesture that comes through rough-housing--an accidental but not necessarily erotic tenderness that let us recognize each other as gay men, brothers in recovery. The touching game felt more like sweetness than a direct invitation into bed. But it stayed with me for a long time, like the troubling theme that never leaves a troubling story. So when the opportunity arose every Monday night to go back to that touching place, it would be skipped over because we didn't want to have the wrong idea about each other.

Still, I despaired whenever Bobby left to walk the beach back to the house he was living in, because even though I wanted to extend that moment of sexual possibility, I knew that to reach my hand deeper down than his crotch and into his love life wasn't something he needed in early recovery. And he was a friend. And I had to remind myself of something I'd always heard but never quite understood: you don't have sex with friends.

Then the New Year kiss happened and it must have meant that Bobby and I were sliding away from friendship into the unknown. And so, the thought came to me that we could be lovers. We would be lovers. Two weeks later, Bobby went to New York and I called him telling him in some form or another that I wanted to see if we could be lovers. He was shocked by my desire, as if once love was put into a context, it would be impossible.

The kiss was in a dream. And Bobby didn't know it was more gravitational than my hand slipping down over his crotch. The boundary between friend and lover was blurred, and never meant to come into real focus. Bobby wanted to stay friends, I think, who kissed and maybe, the way it eventually did turn out with us, had sex every once in a while. But the confusion drained the relationship. I kept showing up for the dream kiss from a man who didn't want me in his dream.

Two summers later, I found myself in the second year of a friendship that had culminated in the same gesture--a hand on the crotch--but this time, outside a cabin, on a lake, in mid-summer. My friend Gabe and I had spent the early part of that summer in a bearable heat wave of tranquility at his family retreat--a funky cabin outside Boston--a few exits down from an infamous rest area. The fort, as Gabe called it, was hidden by the trees and pitched on the top of a slope that reached down to Spectator Pond. Days circled around the pond, and nights, when the pond was too dark for swimming or boating, circled around a parking lot at the mall, where we went to the movies with the rest of America. I was falling in love with Gabe in the darkness and its flickering reminder of a story on a screen. I tried to keep the love away because he was a friend and had been a friend for too long for everything to change suddenly into the other kind of love. I didn't know how to tell Gabe that my heart had grown specific around him.