IT SEEMED to Jim as if life in the first seven weeks of 1993 was a blur of calendars and countdowns, the exquisite anticipation on Friday afternoons when John would come visit, the lonely ache on Sundays after another long good-bye. Jim trudged through the four days in between, trying not to think about John’s warning over New Year’s weekend. I’m not much good at relationships. By some miracle, he seemed willing to try.
It wasn’t a miracle at all, really, more of a don’t-be-a-moron pitch from Meb Wolfe, one of John’s closest friends. “Why can’t you understand that somebody actually cares enough to want to be with you?” she had demanded.
John tensed. “I’m still processing it.”
“Why?”
“What if he leaves?”
Wolfe sighed. She often dragged John along as her date to parties and weddings, where he analyzed her topsy-turvy love life and told her she was crazy when she said, “I must have a fatal flaw that everybody in the world can see but me.”
John would gently reply, “Maybe you’re looking in the wrong places.”
Wolfe, in turn, had decided to help John kick his habit of attracting and then discarding a string of boyfriends. She had long known that her sensitive, skittish friend needed something in the way of unconditional acceptance to kick the insecurities forged in a home with a distant father, and Jim was offering a steady, stable hand. She looked at John and pleaded, “You need to give this a chance.”
John looked terrified. “Give this a chance,” Wolfe said again.
On a frigid Friday seven weeks after New Year’s, John drove along rain-slicked highways to meet Jim at a higher-education conference in Columbus. Unpacking in Jim’s hotel room at dusk, cold rain lashing at the windows, John pulled out a small box, neatly wrapped in green-and-black paper. “I got you something.”
“What?” Jim said, flustered. “I don’t have anything for you.”
John moved closer. “Go ahead. Open it.”
Carefully, Jim pulled off the wrapping paper and lifted the lid on the black velvet box. Inside was a gold ring with five diamonds set side by side. “Holy shit,” he breathed, looking up at John and then slipping the ring on his right hand. He had never worn a ring before, and the metal felt cold and snug against his finger. John pointed to his own ring, a diamond solitaire that he had been wearing for years.
“See?” John said. “They’re different but still the same.”
Jim couldn’t ever remember a feeling quite as pure as the one that swept through him at that moment, and he breathed deeply, silly-happy and utterly certain that the 180 miles between graduate school and John was a distance he could no longer tolerate. He needed to be in Cincinnati.
“Come over next weekend,” John said, pulling Jim close. “It’s time you met Mother.”
Marilyn Arthur, who had navigated a broken marriage with painful restraint, made it a habit after the divorce to cuss, vent, judge, and otherwise speak her mind. “I only went off the pill twice,” she frequently said, pointing to John and Curtis. “You were a sponge baby and you were a foam.” She shed her A-line skirts for rubies and fur coats, took on two favorite new words, fabulous and glamorous, and, with money inherited from her parents, bought John a three-bedroom house. She upgraded to the six-bedroom Abbey after John convinced her that he needed something in the way of a formal entrance. Marilyn quickly became a commanding fixture in the house, mingling with John’s five roommates, who promised to pay rent but rarely did.
The prospect of meeting Marilyn terrified Jim, but he agreed to a visit.
Jim was watching television with John’s roommates early the following Saturday night, the new ring on his right hand, when he heard footsteps on the porch. Marilyn had come to get John for an outing to the Cincinnati Ballet. It had become a comfortable routine for mother and son that often ended with a late-night cocktail at one of the city’s gay bars, where Marilyn held court and showed off her jewelry. More than once, John watched his mother shimmy and shake amid a throbbing cluster of dancing men.
John had planned to introduce Jim to his mother before the ballet, but John was still upstairs dressing when Marilyn arrived. Jim started for the door. “Don’t,” one of John’s roommates called from the couch without looking up. “She has her own key.”
The doorbell rang insistently, and from inside the living room, Jim could hear Marilyn bellow, “Get off your fat ass and open the goddamn door.”
Jim nearly choked. He sprinted for the door and opened it, briefly wondering how such a pretty, petite woman could yell with such gusto. Marilyn looked him up and down for what seemed like an excruciating minute. “You must be Jim,” she said, brushing past him to find John. “Not off to a very good start, now, are we?”
Jim could feel his face turn red. “They told me you had a key.”
It wasn’t long after that when Marilyn brought Jim into the fold. “I have three sons,” she told her friends, and no one dared to question her. That spring, she offered to pay Jim’s tuition at graduate school, but Jim decided to leave school altogether and move into the Abbey with John. Jim got a job in customer service, and when his former German teacher from the University of Cincinnati said she needed a good tenor for the church choir just across the river in Kentucky, Jim quickly signed up. He took John to meet Jennifer Kelley, a striking, rather formal woman who played Renaissance and Baroque music on the harpsichord.
Months earlier, Jim, feeling like an anxious boy again, had told Kelley that he was gay. “Oh sweetie,” she said, each word slow and deliberate. “The only thing that concerns me is that you have been worried and unhappy.”
Now Kelley looked at Jim, who was looking at John, and thought: you two belong together. She tried to convince John to join the choir, too, but John folded his arms, sat down in the pews, and said, “Nope. I am the audience.”
John and Jim visited John’s aunt Paulette, who had retired from her job at a Cincinnati insurance company and moved with her husband to a hundred-year-old farmhouse in the mountains of West Virginia. While four golden retrievers with muddy paws chased rabbits through the hillside, John and Jim sipped red wine on the front porch, swatting at flies and listening to Aunt Tootie’s stories about life in Appalachia. Jim hovered over John, worried about his allergies and asthma, and Paulette thought she had never seen a young couple look so content.
John didn’t like Christmas because it dredged up memories of being forced by his father to decorate a tree even though he was allergic and would often head to bed with a rash on his arms. But that first Christmas with Jim, John decided to visit Chester, who had met and married another woman named Marilyn, with five children of her own. John called her Marilyn 2, and without her, he may never have spoken to his father again. She had refused to marry Chester unless John was invited to the wedding.
Jim was entirely unsure what to expect from a navy man who would be meeting his son’s boyfriend for the first time. In the car, John said, “Now, before dinner, there will be cocktails. There will be lots of wine with dinner. And then Dad will probably drink crème de menthe over ice after that.”
Jim found Chester well-spoken and intelligent and was momentarily silenced by the similarities between father and son. But by the time port was served with dessert, Jim had stopped thinking altogether, and the last thing he remembered just before John hauled him home was the blurry image of Marilyn 2 pushing him toward the powder room. “It’s the smallest room to spin,” she said, dragging a cold washcloth across his forehead.
The only thing that made Jim unhappy in those first happy months with John was that his mother wasn’t there to see his emerging life, not just life as a gay man, but life as an adult with a job at a financial services firm. What would she have seen when she looked at him, no longer a closeted college freshman but a grown man who had found love? The question made Jim ache.
But he grew closer to Marilyn, who spent long afternoons at the Abbey. On John’s twenty-eighth birthday that year, she watched quietly as Jim set out to make an elaborate jelly roll dessert, with layers of whipped cream and strawberries rolled into chocolate cake. But the warm cake crumbled in his hands. “It’s a disaster,” he said, his fingers covered with crumbs.
“That’s all right, honey,” Marilyn said, pushing Jim aside with her hip and grabbing a spoon. “Let’s just make a trifle.”
Jim had never heard of the English dessert, but Marilyn calmly scooped up the chunks of cake, spooned it into bowls, and slathered the cream on top. Later, John would tell Jim, “That’s when I knew Mother liked you. If that had happened to any of my other boyfriends, she would have just watched them fail.”
It seemed to those who knew them that John and Jim had a yin-yang connection, diametrically different in a harmonious way, and more than once, friends in unhappy relationships would remark over a last glass of wine, “Will I ever have that?” John and Jim rarely fought in those early years, mostly because Jim quickly realized that it was impossible to stay mad at a radiant man who didn’t seem to get what had gone wrong, like a happy toddler caught playing with a purple crayon on a white couch.
Once, Jim hurried over to John’s desk at work so they could catch an evening flight to Paris. Jim hated to be late—he considered punctuality a trait passed on from his German ancestors—and when he found John still at his desk, absently chatting by phone with a client and nearly buried under a precarious stack of paper, Jim panicked.
When John hung up, Jim urged, “Come on, John. We’ve got to go. We’ve got to go.” Jim was growing more frustrated by the minute, worried that they’d miss their flight.
John smiled and started sorting through the piles on his desk. Jim raised his voice and said, “You knew we were leaving. Stop!”
“Tone,” John said, wagging a finger at Jim. Disagreements of any kind made John uncomfortable, and he often used that word to signal to Jim that irritation had crept into his voice. “Just one more thing and I’ll be done,” John said calmly.
They drove to the airport and caught their flight. “See?” John said, grinning, as Jim slumped in his seat, exhausted. “We made it.”
Jim felt that same sense of exasperation when he arrived home from a trip to see family on a warm spring night in 1994, tired from traveling and anxious to see John.
“How did it go, Boo?” John asked, hugging Jim at the front door. “Did you have a nice time? Oh, and I made an offer on a house.”
Jim let his suitcase fall to the floor. “Huh?”
“I put in an offer on a house.” John was shifting from foot to foot, giddy.
They had been house hunting for weeks, musing about the perfect layout, the friendliest neighborhood, the benefits of a fixer-upper or a renovated home. But Jim couldn’t imagine John making such an important decision without him, on a whim, while Jim was away with family. Maybe it was a joke, John being silly.
But John said, “I know you’re going to love it.”
Jim looked squarely at John, furious. “What the hell?”
“You’re going to love it,” John said again.
“John?” Jim’s voice was rising.
“It’s a cottage with two bedrooms,” John continued, ignoring Jim. “Trust me.”
As it turned out, Jim did like the house, but the deal fell apart over a bad inspection, and they ended up buying a Cape Cod in Cincinnati’s hilltop Mount Washington neighborhood. After ripping out the wood paneling and refinishing the oak floors, they put a koi pond out back and settled right in.
Cincinnati was in the throes of a dusty, muggy spring in 1995, the worst kind of wheezing weather for a lifelong asthmatic, and John had been sick for weeks. But the cry from the bathroom came so suddenly that Jim had to stop for a moment to be sure he wasn’t hearing things. Moments before, they had been sitting on the couch watching television.
There it was again, barely a whimper. “Jim?”
Jim raced toward the bathroom, stumbling over furniture. Something was wrong. He could tell by the raspy sound of John’s voice. Where was that damned inhaler? Jim couldn’t remember. He flung open the door and found John holding on to the edge of the countertop so tightly that his knuckles were white. His jeans were wrapped around his ankles.
John gasped. “Call 911.”
Jim found the phone, but for a brief, horrifying moment, his fingers wouldn’t dial. Finally, he spit out some words. “Allergic asthmatic. Can’t breathe. Please. Come.” He called Marilyn, who had just been to the ballet, then rushed back into the bathroom to pull up John’s pants. It seemed as if John had stopped breathing altogether, and by the time Marilyn burst into the house minutes later—she had chased the fire truck down the street—Jim couldn’t speak. He pointed. He sobbed. He wandered through the kitchen and living room, certain that his twenty-nine-year-old partner, who had once told his dubious friends that he would die before he turned thirty, would get them all good, right on time.
The paramedics squeezed into the bathroom around John, who was curled up on the floor. “John? Can you hear us?” one of them shouted. Jim watched as they lifted John onto a stretcher, unconscious, and loaded him into the ambulance beside Marilyn, who had gone back into nursing after her divorce. Curtis was there, though Jim couldn’t remember when he’d shown up. Curtis coaxed Jim into the car and they followed the ambulance to the hospital. John was rushed into intensive care, and Jim, Marilyn, and Curtis spent an agonizing hour in the waiting room.
What if he died here on Mother’s Day weekend? Jim thought miserably, in the dismal green hallways of the emergency room. They were supposed to have been on a boat on the Ohio River, celebrating a friend’s wedding. Jim had urged John to stay home just in case John’s asthma flared up, but “just in case” was never supposed to happen, not in their air-conditioned house after a movie night on the couch. Now Jim, too, struggled to catch his breath.
Finally, a doctor approached. “We have him breathing and stabilized.” A violent reaction to new asthma medication had restricted John’s airways, and he had gone into respiratory arrest. The words sounded so ominous, Jim wanted to scream. “Do you want to go back and see him?” the doctor asked.
Jim hesitated, tears streaming down his face.
They were in a Catholic hospital in Cincinnati, where it wasn’t good to be gay. The city’s voters two years earlier had not only repealed a law meant to protect the gay community from discrimination but also amended Cincinnati’s charter to specifically ban any legal protections moving forward, one of the harshest laws of its kind in the country.
In the days leading up to the passage of Issue 3, John and Jim had heard radio commercials that declared, “The homosexuals already have equal rights. They’re asking for special rights and that’s not right. Let’s stop this in Cincinnati.”
A group called Citizens United for the Preservation of Civil Rights had released Inside the Homosexual Agenda, a video that flashed pictures of writhing, kissing gay men in leather, bras, or heavy makeup. The narrator warned of promiscuity and child molestation in an AIDS-stricken gay community. “What is at stake is the future of America,” U.S. senator Trent Lott declared on the video.
Standing in the hospital waiting room, Jim feared long looks and odd stares for the first time in his three years as a gay man in a long-term relationship. A nurse had asked him who he was. He wasn’t immediate family, but John was his family. What if he was told that he couldn’t go back to be with John? It was a gut-wrenching possibility that would stick with Jim for years.
Fully expecting to be told to wait outside, Jim said, “I’m his significant other.”
The nurse paused, but to Jim’s immense relief, she showed him to John’s room. He was unconscious with a breathing tube snaked down his throat. Jim took John’s hand and said, “You need to come home.”
For two more days, Jim crouched by John’s bedside in the hospital, waiting for him to wake up and unsure if he ever would. The thought of life without John was nothing less than terrifying, and Jim paced the room and the hallways, waited some more, unable to sleep or eat. Finally, late on a Monday night, John opened his eyes. He tried to talk, but the breathing tube was still in his throat.
“Don’t,” Jim said, rubbing John’s forehead.
When the doctor took the tube out, John looked at Jim and whispered, “Good thing we didn’t go to that wedding.”
Jim smiled for the first time in two days, thinking about the petty annoyances that had inched into their relationship. John considered bad reality television a weekend sport. He left messy piles of mail and magazines on nearly every flat surface in their house. He was impulsive and quick to spend money, once heading to the home improvement store to a buy a wood slat for their bed and returning with design plans for an entirely new kitchen. But as Jim looked at John in the hospital, groggy from the near fatal asthma attack, he no longer cared about anything but getting John home. Despite John’s ominous predictions, he would live to see his thirtieth birthday.
Jim bent low and whispered, “I hope nothing like this ever happens again.”