The Nest(46)

But what Jack really wanted was to have sex. Not earnest, leftist, collegiate sex—sex that required far too much conversation and not nearly enough lube—but Greenwich Village, Christopher Street, drop your pants but leave on those leather chaps, mindless, mind-blowing, anonymous sex.

So it was with a certain karmic comeuppance, Jack would realize later, that mere months after arriving in the West Village, he would meet the love of his life, Walker Bennett.

WALKER LIKED TO SAY that he’d been born gay and middle-aged. He’d grown up in Greenwich Village; his parents were roving adjunct professors, self-anointed socialists who intermittently practiced open marriage and dabbled in bisexuality and refused the tenure track because it was nothing more than a union to protect the interests of the already-coddled upper class. When Walker came out to them in high school, it had all the Sturm und Drang of him announcing that he was switching from violin to cello.

Early on, Walker knew he wanted a different kind of life from his parents who lived paycheck to paycheck, collected furniture on the street the night before the bulk garbage pickups, counted coins in the sofa cushion to pay for take-out fried rice. After graduating from law school in the mid-1980s, he returned to the West Village, planning to work at the same corporate firm where he’d done his summer internship, only to find himself deluged by neighbors and old family friends, mostly gay men, who were suddenly getting sick and dying in alarming numbers and under mysterious circumstances. They wanted Walker to help them write a will or fight an eviction or understand their disability insurance. Within months, Walker had more work than he could handle, some funneled to him from GMHC, some from the prominent, often still-closeted gay business community. They trusted Walker. The premium he charged his wealthier clients allowed him to take on a lot of work pro bono, which he loved. After only one year, he was able to hire help, rent office space. Soon he was a neighborhood fixture: Walker, the genial, slightly overweight neighborhood attorney who would handle pretty much anything—even if you were broke, especially if you were queer.

The night Walker met Jack, he’d wandered into the raucous bar down near the Christopher Street pier on a whim. He usually preferred the quieter gay watering holes, but he’d had a long day. He was still in his work clothes, and as he made his way through the lively Friday night crowd, he spotted Jack, who was difficult not to notice, bare chested and wearing extremely short shorts, dancing by himself, ecstatically, to “I Will Survive.” Walker hated that stupid f*cking song. Everyone around them was most assuredly not surviving. Two of his clients, both sick and quarantined at St. Vincent’s, had died that week, making six in just the last month. He needed a drink. He needed to get really, really drunk. As he approached the bar, Jack started waving at him, calling him over. Walker wondered if they’d met before. Was he a client? A friend of a client?

“Have we met?” he yelled at Jack, trying to be heard above the deafening, thumping disco beat. Jack shook his head no and looked Walker up and down. Then he leaned close to Walker’s ear; his cheek was damp and smelled of perspiration and some kind of too-sweet cologne. “That suit looks really uncomfortable,” Jack said, his voice hoarse from singing. He handed Walker a shot of tequila.

And in a move so out of character, so weirdly un-Walker-like and spontaneous and defiant and hopeful, Walker tipped back the shot, swallowed, put the empty glass on the bar, grabbed the back of Jack’s sweaty head, and kissed him full on the lips.

Jack kissed Walker back, then pulled away and grinned, and said, “How about we start the weekend by undoing that belt?” They’d been together ever since.

STANDING AT HIS AND WALKER’S BEDROOM WINDOW in Greenwich Village (technically the far, far west village; their building was as far west as you could go without living on a houseboat in the Hudson), Jack watched a Carnival cruise ship glide up the center of the river, heading to collect its passengers at Pier 88. He’d probably see the boat later that evening, being tugged in reverse until it reached the open harbor and could swing south. A cruise sounded good to Jack right now, anything to get him out of New York and to take his mind off Leo and his massive Leo-related migraine.

The afternoon was so cold that the bike paths along the river were deserted. The Christopher Street pier, across the way, was no longer the decrepit, free-for-all cruising spot it had been when he and Walker moved in, more than twenty years ago, a place you could go for an easy afternoon frolic or to sunbathe nude when the weather was fine. Giuliani had cleaned up the piers and transformed the entire waterfront into sanitized paths and miniparks for walkers and bikers and strollers. (“Fooliani,” Walker would say; he’d hated Giuliani’s particular brand of dictatorship almost as much as he’d hated Koch’s insistence on remaining closeted.)

Even scrubbed, the pier remained a gathering place for gay youth. No matter how biting the cold, there were always a few hardy souls out, huddled, trying to shield their cigarette lighters from the wind. Jack wondered why they weren’t at school, if they were there because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. He envied the teens on the waterfront, hopping up and down to stay warm, drinking beer from a paper bag—no cares, no worries. What did you have to worry about at seventeen when you were young and untethered and in New York City? How bad could it be, really? Did kids even worry about being gay, worry about having to tell their families? He wished that was all he had to agonize about. He’d give anything for that to be the thing he needed to confess.