Five Tuesdays in Winter(36)

But on Sundays in college, with hours to trail my eyes up and down the length of Paul, who was quite narrow, with small, compact muscles in his calves and little fins for shoulder blades, the unearthing began. Proust had his madeleines and I my Doritos. Even now I can stick my nose into a bag of them and travel swiftly back to our corner room, the New England gloom and what felt at the time like a great tangle of feeling but was merely a boyish lust.

Without question, Paul was straight. He dated Marion Kelley freshman year, Ellie Sullivan, Bridgett Pappas, and Cheryl Lynch sophomore year, Lori Duff sophomore summer and straight up until the winter formal of senior year, where he met Gail McNamara, the very worst of the whole hit parade, whom he married two springs after we graduated, in 1987.

“I’m sorry you’re not my best man. My mother made me choose Joe.” Joe was the meanest of his brothers. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have come home.” He was fastening a yellow rose to my lapel in the basement of the church.

“Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.” I was drunk from lunch. I was nervous. I had had sex—real sex—with a man for the first time a few weeks earlier. I knew I was gay. Finally. I could say it to myself without feeling nauseated. I also knew Paul was marrying the wrong person, knew every complaint he’d ever had about Gail. She treated him like an employee; she didn’t always smell good; she was moody, irrational, not always honest, and used sex as a bargaining chip. I waited for him to crack, to beg me to help him bolt. We still had fifteen minutes before the ceremony.

“Are you sure about this?” I said finally.

“Yes. I’ve pinned on six of these already.”

“No.”

“Am I sure I want to get married?”

“To Gail.”

He laughed. “I’m extremely sure.”

A car of bridesmaids had pulled up. Their ankles and hemlines were at eye level through the small windows.

He wasn’t even twenty-four. I said, “It’s like you’ve walked into an enormous shop and chosen the first little tchotchke on the table.”

He laughed. He had an amazing patience with people, even drunk people trying to derail his life at the last minute. “Gail is not a tchotchke. And she’s about to be my wife.”

He was devastating in his gray suit. A black line went down the outside of the leg and I wanted to touch it, trace it. I wanted to lift the coattail and have one last glimpse of the bum I looked at so primly, so reluctantly, the longing strangled deep inside me, for four years of Sundays. But now was not the time to tell my best friend I was gay and I wanted him. Now was the time to climb the basement stairs, to stand in a dark hallway, give him a dry, maidenly hug, and wish him Godspeed.

I told Paul last. First I told my mother (she said she’d tell my father herself, but I don’t think she ever did), and then I told my brothers, one by one, in an elaborate fashion involving a letter and a gift and a surreptitious meeting in the telephone closet beneath the stairs one Christmas that will be mocked forevermore. Pssssst, is all one brother has to say to another, pointing to an imaginary telephone closet (my parents are both dead now, the house sold), and everyone is practically peeing their pants. For Paul I had no letter or gift or telephone closet. We used to meet a few times a year when his work brought him to Boston or mine brought me to New York, but I couldn’t do it in person. He called me up one night (he was usually the one to call, late at night, some awful music on in the background) and when he’d gone on too long about his kid’s strep throat, I blurted it out. “By the way, I’m gay.”

He surprised me. He took it badly. He was silent, then grunted out a few measly sentences about being glad to have been told and got off the phone. He never called back. I lost him, just like that.

I got out of New England. I went to Seattle with my boyfriend Steve. I had been about to break up with Steve, but then he told me about a possible transfer to the West Coast. He was my first real boyfriend, and he’d been so generous and tender, helping to peel back all my prickly layers of fear and self-loathing, but I felt like it was time to move on, see what else was on offer.

Moving, resettling, making new friends, reconfiguring routes to coffee shops, bookstores, restaurants, clubs— all that can delay the end of a relationship indefinitely. We were still in that stage, our third year in Seattle, when Paul called.

Steve answered. We didn’t have caller ID then, so phone calls were still a mystery. Steve started flapping his arm immediately, waving me up off the couch with huge sweeps while carrying on in a flat, placid voice, saying, “Yeah, I think he’s here somewhere. Unless he fell off the balcony into the neighbors’ weed.” Steve loved that we overlooked an illegal garden. He told it to everyone we met. “I hope you’re not a cop,” he added before covering the receiver with his palm and mouthing the words Paul Donovan over and over. Steve and I had been together eight years by then and though I’d tried to downplay my attraction to my college roommate, it was clear to me now that I’d hidden nothing.

During that whole short conversation, Steve was leaping from sofa to sofa, a mockery, a parody of my slamming heart.

Paul was coming to Seattle on business. He’d run into my brother Sean at a Red Sox game and he’d mentioned I was living out there. Did I want to have a drink next Tuesday night?

I went through the motions of checking the calendar and coming back to tell him I could get free.