Five Tuesdays in Winter(37)

He suggested 7:30 at his hotel.

“Great. I’ll put it right on the calendar,” I said, not knowing what was coming out of my mouth and Steve still hopping around me.

“You and your calendar,” Paul laughed, as if this were a thing he’d known about me for years. “You won’t remember?”

On Tuesday night I left Steve pouting in the apartment. He couldn’t understand why he couldn’t come along or at least meet us for dessert.

“We’re having a drink, not dinner.”

“Then let me meet you for the last drink.”

“The last drink might be the first drink.”

“Then let me just go to the bar, pretend to run into you. I don’t have to be your boyfriend. I can be a coworker. I can be your masseuse.”

“Like I want him to think I have a masseuse. It’s bad enough I’m gay.”

Steve shut his eyes and shook his head. “All the years your therapist and I have put into deprogramming you and it just doesn’t make a dent, does it?”

“It’s bad enough to Paul that I’m gay. It ruined our friendship.”

“He ruined the friendship.”

“Yes. Goodbye.” I kissed him on the lips, which he liked. We weren’t doing a whole lot of that lately. He held on to me and I let him, knowing that it increased the chances that he wouldn’t follow me.

Paul was at the bar, elbows on the counter, looking over the bartender’s head at a ballgame on the flat-screen.

“This place is like a morgue.”

He turned to look at me. “Welcome to my world. Hotel bars and conference rooms.”

He was middle-aged. His hair had retreated toward his crown, his shoulders had fattened and curled in. We didn’t shake hands. I didn’t want to. I busied myself with my jacket, made an unnecessary fuss about where to put it, and came slowly back to the chair beside him. It was anger that was making my heart thrash. I was still angry at him. Whether it was because he had dropped me or because he was no longer a god on earth but a middle-aged salesman, I did not know.

“But I like places like this,” he said, shaking the ice in his glass. “Everyone drifting in from everywhere, from nowhere. Look at the woman in the corner. God, what is going to happen to her tonight?”

“A man in white polyester pants is going to walk in and spot her.”

“The entertainment.” He nodded to the corner, where there was a small stage with just a microphone on a stand.

“And he can just tell how good she’d be in duet.”

“ ‘I remember when,’ ” he began, falsetto. “ ‘You couldn’t wait to love me.’ ”

“ ‘Used to hate to leave me.’ ” I couldn’t help it.

“ ‘Now after lovin’ me late at night.’ ” We laughed. He could still hit the high notes. All the nights we’d sat on our beds with a beer and let our minds wander together like this. It wasn’t like talking. It was effortless. Desultorating, I used to call it. Could he just slip back into that without an apology? Would I let him?

“Or,” I said, “you could just go over there and fuck her yourself.”

His eyebrows twitched down and quickly up. He wasn’t going to show me his surprise at my bitterness. “I could indeed.” He drained his drink. I felt him trying to think of something witty to add. At that moment, I felt like he couldn’t have a thought or an impulse I couldn’t anticipate.

“Do you travel for work?” he asked.

“No. Never.” He didn’t know what I did. “Clearly you do.”

“Not as much as they want me to. It’s not worth the battles at home when I come back. Gail is such a bean counter. A trip like this and I lose any possibility of an hour to myself for the next three weekends.”

I didn’t want to hear about Gail. I had given him the chance to defect. “So what do you do with an hour to yourself?”

“I don’t know. It’s all hypothetical. There is no free time. We’ve got three kids and a fixer-upper we never fixed up so I’m just managing the chaos dawn to dusk. Hardware store, pharmacy, soccer game. Repeat.”

The bartender finally noticed me and came over. We knew each other from a party but neither of us acknowledged it and it created a tension Paul picked up on.

“What was that about?”

“What?”

“That little”—he rubbed his fingers together— “frisson.”

“There was no frisson.”

“There was a frisson. I know a frisson when I feel one.”

“You might have felt a frisson. I was just ordering a Campari.”

“A Campari. Is that some sort of code?”

“Code for what?”

“You know, a way to tell the bartender you’re gay.”

I stood up.

“Sit down,” he said in a bored stentorian voice he must use with his kids.

“You owe me an apology, not further insult.”

I saw his face flinch into an imitation and then flatten back out. I wondered if he did that to his kids, mimic them, the way my father had mimicked me. It was the first time I’d recognized the similarity between Paul and my father.

I should have left then.