Best Gay Romance 2009

Ralph, a ticklish young dodger with no carpentry skills, had been coerced into helping renovate a tree house. The hulking oak that cradled the tree house had sprouted, generations before, in the dividing line between two properties down the street from where Ralph lived. Therefore, like all trees, it belonged to no one.

Neither household on either side of the tree claimed it. They did not dispute the tree house in its boughs, considering it, as well, public property. This surprised nobody. The street, protected underneath umbrellas of elm and the aforementioned oak, was a civil and merry place where the houses were shingled and aged but, as the saying went, kept up.

Novembers found the cars on either side of the drizzled street parallel-nestled under the interlaced limbs, with wet orange and red leaves stuck to their bumper stickers, stickers that promoted political hopefuls or urged peeling messages of world peace. In high blooming Aprils, from the open windows of the nearby piano instructor, dusty and forgotten composers found students to cherish and remember them, if in a plodding but always improving way, beneath the branches’ breeze-tickled sway.

The street and its mellow inhabitants, human and arboreal, had charmed Ralph, lured him into taking an apartment there, and provided a golden sense of comfort after the smarting breakup with his boyfriend Nick, on whom Ralph had finally begun to stop dwelling, as he persisted in telling himself.

And then Ralph told himself, “Three fifty-two? Can it really be that late?” as he dropped the paperback of poems by Yeats on his lamplit side table and answered the soft knock at his door.

Yolanda, a neighbor from the house next door, stood in the upper stairwell outside Ralph’s apartment. In her left hand she gripped the box wrench she had borrowed from him six months ago. “Why are you still awake?”

“The better to answer the door. And, hi. I let my bedtime get away from me, I guess. And I bought myself a new wrench four months ago, so you might as well keep that one. Want to come in?”

She pocketed the tool in her red rickrack-trimmed apron and made herself at home on Ralph’s only chair, while he returned to his spot on the sofa. She fussed with her dreads and brought up the topic of the tree house.

The tree house, handsome, overgrown, roofed, and rambling, was quite complete. However, in that neighborhood it was tradition to add to the tree house when anyone on the street delivered a baby. In this case the neighbors were organizing, the coming weekend, to build a turret. The addition was in honor of wee healthy Pablo John Jenkins, born a week before at Number 16, the house with the elaborate scrollwork that, in a less agreeable neighborhood, would inspire bitter envy among the neighboring houses rather than homey pride.

“Want to help us?” Yolanda said. “The pay sucks, meaning there isn’t any, but I’ve noticed your weekends aren’t exactly booked, anyway.”

“How can anybody resist you?” He fondled his felt book-mark and then laughed. “You know, it’s great that some woman had a baby and all, but if I were to run off and have some unprotected sex, I’d get a lecture, not a tree house. I swear, heterosexuals and their baby showers and other bizarre rituals.”

“Did you just say something about you having sex? Dirty talk. How rare.” Yolanda yawned. “All I ever get out of you, every Monday morning, is, ‘Yeah, I stayed in this weekend and darned socks,’ or something.”

Unsure if she referred to his lame puns or his secluded convalescence, Ralph went with a neutral, “Really—and spoil the fun?”

He smiled at her and admired her eyes for a second. “Maybe one of these days that’ll happen to me again.” Ralph, much like any other hopeful so named, wanted to favor, to be pleasant, and to mate.

Ralph would say, “Hear, hear,” when in agreement. He would say, “There, there,” when he sympathized. He would say, “Duran Duran,” for that matter, if asked the performer of that long-ago song about a hungry wolf, if only to demonstrate how like any other Ralph to be found here or there he could be. His soft pulsing heart had entered the fray of men and emerged disfigured, but there no knight was safe, no matter how glorious or inauspicious was his dubbing.

The breakup with Nick had left tarnish on Ralph’s armor. Yolanda, a craftsperson by trade, had the sort of trained eye that could zero in on this sort of imperfection, and the urge that all friends have to want to remedy the situation. She mentioned the possibility of her available friend John showing up to lend a hand with construction of the tree house that weekend. She was cut off from divulging further details about John’s history, eye color, or opinion of Shakespeare, this last a matter of vital importance to Ralph, when another set of knuckles rapped on Ralph’s door.

Terry, Ralph’s fellow-insomniac neighbor from across the hall, straight as an arrow and just as slender, soft-voiced a, “Can I come in? I heard talking,” and was shown inside. Terry returned the cookie cutters borrowed from Ralph and sat on the floor near Yolanda’s dusty crossed boots. Terry often dropped by for brief discussions late at night, but tended to stay longer when Yolanda happened to be present. Ralph suspected that Terry liked Yolanda.

He fetched two cold soda pops from his kitchen and set them between his neighbors who were, without knowing it, decorating his otherwise monastic living room. Ralph preferred to bedeck a room with friends instead of with knickknacks. He listened to them bicker.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Yolanda said to Ralph, “but it’s May. What is this airhead doing,” her motor oil-stained finger indicated Terry, “borrowing cookie cutters from you when it’s nowhere near Christmas?”

Ralph understood Terry’s reticence in making an overture Yolanda’s way, and it had nothing to do with Yolanda’s propensity for the brusque. In his encounters with the single, the eligible, and the fascinating, Ralph, too, clammed up. He returned to his sofa, drew his cozy blanket around him, and, to the tune of their chatter, soon enough fell asleep. Ever since his breakup, silence and the lack of human noise had bothered Ralph, and he was glad to have found a solution tonight. He smiled, perhaps dreaming. His problem with meeting men could wait, but perchance there he was dreaming, too.

He was reminded of his problem late on Saturday afternoon, when he approached the tree house and located Yolanda amid the swarm of would-be carpenters. She accessed him.

“What are you wearing?” she said. He prided himself on having understood her despite the drywall screw clamped in the corner of her mouth, as if she had taken up smoking the hard stuff. “I go to all this trouble,” she said, “fixing you up with one of my in-house stallions, and the best you can manage is a shirt that does zilch for you?”

He had forgotten about her friend John, the heart candidate. The week had been a stable one but the weekend, he saw, was turning into an emergency situation.

The shirt Ralph was wearing was uncomfortably fancy, one his old boyfriend Nick had given him. He wondered if a woman wearing a pair of overalls with a big rip in the ass and a SHAZAM! T-shirt was in the position to mete out fashion dictates, and decided, for what little he knew about the topic, that it was best not to argue. Ralph nodded and began walking back to his apartment, and his closet.

This had been a ridiculous idea, he told himself, this attempting to meet someone new and to risk his heart. His heart’s neighbor, his stomach, was beginning to writhe and revolt, as if anticipating where the state of the neighborhood was going.

He paused on the sidewalk when he saw old Mrs. Jenkins in her wheelchair on the front porch of Number 16, surfing the Internet with one hand and rocking a basinet containing the inspiration for today’s construction with the other. He envied the baby’s sleep. “Hi, there, Mrs. Jenkins,” he said. “That must be your new grandson, eh?”

“Oh, about the same as I always am,” she said, squinting at Ralph in the leaf-dappled light. “I’d be better if Mr. Jenkins was still with us.”

Ralph wasn’t sure when Mrs. Jenkins had lost her husband, or lost her hearing, but the dull image of himself, lonely and bereft, now and in the years to come, haunted his imagination and shut out all other considerations. Did he want to remain alone? Did he want to say he had never tried to find somebody to love again? In his head, Yeats’s “Brown Penny” began its opening whisper, which drowned out, with irony, all of Ralph’s loud protests against new love.

The feeling that he was wasting what precious time he had been given shamed him, there in the shade, particularly when he happened to own a magic yellow-and-white baseball shirt. The shirt, given what the cut of it did for his shoulders and arms, and his self-esteem, might have made Ralph appear more appealing, and it was folded in his dresser, mere footsteps away, if only he could dredge up the derring-do to take those steps.

His old boyfriend Nick had never cared for that shirt, and had once belittled Ralph for wearing it, claiming its shabby condition caused Ralph to resemble something with B.O. in a bus depot.

Though he hadn’t worn the shirt since that historic comment, Ralph could recall as if from yesterday how the shirt felt, sleepily soft, second-skin comfortable, priceless, and well worth the brown pennies the thrift store had charged him for the old thing. Only thus armored might Ralph steel himself to attempt knighthood again, and attempt to favor, to be pleasant, and to mate.

And so he returned to the assortment of scrapped and salvaged woodwork that would be used for the tree house’s addition, resolved to at least hammer one generous nail in tribute to Pablo John Jenkins, the Healthy and Wee, before running back home for safe cozy cover. Ralph comforted himself with the thought that, for centuries, chickening out had been a viable alternative. William Butler Yeats could go launch a kite.

Ralph spied a clean-cut, confident man talking to Yolanda. He overheard her call the man John. A chilly certainty plucked on his tight nerves that this man was the friend with whom Yolanda intended to shackle Ralph. This man, without meaning to, terrified Ralph. Guillotines were clean-cut and confident, too, if one looked and philosophized long enough.

In Ralph’s mind men like this, or like his old boyfriend for example, never left the house without a close shave and a pressed shirt. Perhaps their league seemed to suspect that Casual Fridays were diabolical plots devised by the Salvation Army, or Old Navy, or some other branch of an informally dressed militia out for blood, or at the very least out for creases and worn knees.

Ralph had tried to keep up along that certain man’s elegantly paved road before, and knew that he lacked the fuel to endure another attempt at it. He ducked out of view, behind two women who were carrying several long boards, and clambered up the tree house’s ladder.

In the tree he found a young fellow hunkered down on the decking, with two wooden drumsticks in his hardy two fists, teaching a little boy how to drum.

Quite a different drummer, this one. His smile pleased Ralph in the same way that rivers enjoy moons reflected in their rippling. Working fast, Ralph pilfered an inventory of the fellow’s pointed white canines, his convoluted chest hair curling around the collar of a gray T-shirt, and his long forearms, before the smile, and the lesson, ended.

“Sorry about that.” The fellow offered his mild keen eyes, and an open hand to shake, to Ralph. “Anyway, hello. Friends call me Wolfie.”

Ralph grasped his hand. “Mine call me Ishmael,” he said, hoping for if not a laugh then at least another glimpse of that smile.

“Um.” No clever story, at that instant, came to Ralph. “A guy my friend is setting me up on a date with,” he said. “I just got a look at him—not my type, you know?”

“Hey, now. Aren’t you supposed to eat your vegetables?” The fellow poked a finger in the boy’s stomach, making him giggle. “You probably like brussels sprouts as much as he likes girls, so lay off.”

Ralph sat, slid his legs between the mismatched balusters of the railing, and let his feet dangle and swing. “What I’m supposed to be doing,” he said, “is helping to add to this tree house. I’m about as qualified to do that as I am to date somebody, though.” He smiled. “But enough about me. What aren’t you qualified to do?”

“Yeah.” He sat next to Ralph and swung his feet, as well. “I mean, thanks. I’m working on it. I rent a studio, downtown. It’s deserted there at night, no one to bother, good for practicing, you know? I mean, I get a little loud and crazy with it.”

“We’re still—” Ralph stopped himself from ending with, talking about drumming, aren’t we? He chose to leave it at that, as if the statement were deep philosophy and not the result of sitting too close to the tense thighs of this lad, of begrudging the breeze that tugged on the frayed strings of his denim shorts.

Ralph pointed at the combed head of hair that was still bent in conversation with Yolanda’s dreads. “There he is.”

Ralph pressed his forehead against the rail, still looking at the man below in the way that snaggletoothed children look at orthodontists. “All right, all right. Maybe he’s not so bad. I don’t know. It’s just, he’s—what’s the word? Fastidious?”

“Ah.” For the span of a moment the swinging of their legs achieved rhythmic unison, and then fell back into their differing speeds. “My ex couldn’t take my drumming at night. I keep hoping, though, and try not to let people with ears get me down.”

Ralph stood, brushed off his backside, and sighed. “I guess I’m not giving him much of a chance, am I? Least I can do is say a quick, ‘Hello,’ and see what he’s like.”

Ralph’s counsel stood, as well. “I need to get going, myself. I tell you, all this not working is making me hungry.”

“Like the wolf?” Ralph performed a sting with his index fingers on the railing. “Sorry. I ought to leave the drumming to you.”

“No, no, you’re not bad, there. I see a bright future for you.” He offered Ralph his hand again. “Anyway, very nice meeting you, Ralph. If you’re free later, I’m meeting my bandmates tonight, at Storky’s. You know it?”

“There you go.” As he descended from the tree house he added, “And my friends don’t really call me Wolfie. My ex used to, though. He thought it fit me. My name’s John.”

“That’s right, Moby Dick, you didn’t.” The early evening sky was blooming with the color of lemonade, as John walked toward his old Volkswagen Beetle parked at the curb. He looked back at Ralph and smiled.

John made a face and swiveled his splayed level hand as if it were the deck of a rocking boat. “He’s no John Bonham,” he yelled, before getting into his car, starting it, and puttering away.

Something, some rewarding quality of the warm air, made the starting night feel unfettered. Ralph’s old boyfriend had not cared much for Shakespeare either. Housed up among the wriggling green oak leaves, Ralph closed his eyes and opened them and made the reckoning to not let his old boyfriend hinder him for one day more. Besides, John’s bumper stickers agreed with him.

“He called you a dick,” the little boy said with glee, using the drumsticks that John had left behind and employing Ralph’s right shin as a substitute snare drum.

As much as Ralph had figured that he would dread the experience of embarking from the tree house for solid ground, or coming back to earth, the act of it was not so bad. He smiled when he found Yolanda resting in the grass and eating one of the cookies that Ralph’s insomniac neighbor Terry had made.

“And then some. And, hey, pretty thoughtful of Terry, bringing cookies, eh? Tree-shaped cookies, at that. Indeed, very thoughtful.”

“Poor guy. He probably thinks he doesn’t stand a chance with you. I think he’s got the idea that you’re a lesbian, too.”

With the day’s work at an end, Ralph linked his arm with Yolanda’s while he walked her home, comparing notes on whether it was he or she who was the more clueless about lovers. She invited him inside her house for a beer, but Ralph declined. He had sudden dinner plans and needed to change his shirt. He hummed while he did so. Foolish, same as love, though it might have been, a reverie had already found happy occupancy in his thoughts, one of drowsing on a bed while a drummer drummed nearby, under an inconstant moon, downtown.