When I first met Stu’s mother, she pulled him aside and said, “You should marry this girl.”
Thirteen years later, he did.
Just not the way his mother meant.
If you’re lucky, really lucky, you have one friend in this life who feels like a gift. I’ve always felt the universe conspired to bring Stu and me together at a time in our lives when we needed each other most. In the summer of 1991, I had recently finished college and moved three thousand miles away from home to pursue my dream of writing for television. I had no experience save for a screenwriting class or two, and one entertainment industry contact whose power extended to getting me a lunch meeting with the producer of Blossom, which was in its last season. Needless to say, my career wasn’t soaring.
Out of options, I got a job as a counselor at a summer camp. I became friends with another counselor named Paul who introduced me to his friend Stu, who was in town for a job interview. Stu could have been Ferris Bueller’s twin. Not only because he looked just like Matthew Broderick at seventeen, but an impish grin lit up his eyes in a way that immediately made me like him. I had just gotten out of a three-year relationship and wasn’t looking for another. But after one night of hanging out with Stu, I knew I wanted him in my life.
He moved to town a few weeks later. His voice on my answering machine sounded both jolly and tired, a tone I would come to know like the inside of my head. He didn’t have a car yet and asked if I would take him apartment hunting. I drove to meet him at the Hollywoodland Motel, where I almost tripped on the minifridge that had been pushed out of his room and left on the concrete walkway. I found him standing on the bed, throwing a shoe up at the ceiling and ducking.
“Thank God,” he said. “I was so lonely I’d begun to name the cockroaches. The ones living inside the fridge have already met their maker.”
That evening, as we wearily approached our tenth vacant apartment, we both stopped short. The sky above the small complex was purple.
We turned to each other and said, “This is the one.”
Two days later, Stu moved into his new studio apartment in Reseda, leaving the cockroaches and isolation behind. To thank me for my help, he took me to dinner at a restaurant called Yamashiro. Located high up in the hills, the city lights sparkled beneath it in every direction. Our first date, I recall thinking, even though the word was never spoken.
Too many umbrella drinks later, I had to hide in a bathroom stall making unpleasant noises. When I walked out, Tina Yothers (yes, from Family Ties) asked if I was okay. She seemed genuinely concerned. I nodded weakly and thanked her. To this day, if one of us isn’t giving the other the attention we feel we deserve, we’ll say, “I bet Tina Yothers would care.”
Stu and I quickly became inseparable. We went to Disneyland, where the look of wonder and excitement on his face was like a little boy seeing the happiest place on earth for the first time. In a whisper, he admitted it was his dream to work for Disney some day. It seemed the perfect job for someone who had a poster on his wall with the proclamation, We don’t stop playing when we get old, we get old when we stop playing.
Stu and I played a lot.
I stayed over at his apartment as often as my own. We could never get to bed before three. We cooked together. We bought bikes and rode them all over Los Angeles. We went to amusement parks, on shopping trips, to concerts, parties, even temple on the high holidays only to swear we’d never go back (he hasn’t).
We’d spend hours in bookstores, where it would be my turn to dream about writing books for kids. We’d go out for late dinners, which were usually accompanied by too many drinks and a random celebrity or two, and always ended with a lengthy discussion on the meaning of life, or at least the meaning of our lives.
We both desperately wanted to believe that true magic existed, and went in search of it at new age bookstores, psychic fairs, renaissance festivals, holistic centers, and magic shops. We took classes in Lucid Dreaming and Out of Body Experiences and stayed up late to write short stories based on The Chronicles of Narnia.
It didn’t occur to me that we weren’t dating until a friend of mine asked if Stu was a good kisser and I realized I had no idea. She said if he hadn’t made a move in all this time, he was probably gay. I disagreed. How would I not know a thing like that after all this time?
Reasons I thought Stu was straight:
Reasons I should have known Stu was gay:
When months of playful flirting on my part didn’t lead anywhere, I finally asked Stu if he ever thought of us as more than friends. He said of course he’d thought of it, but that he had a habit of losing friends after he dated them, and our friendship was too important to him to risk losing.
I should have seen right through that, but I didn’t. I actually thought it was pretty cool, and I realized I felt the same way.
Plus, I could never date someone who was skinnier than I was.
A few months later I began to date a guy named Aaron, and on our third date, I introduced him to Stu. That night, Aaron bet me a hundred dollars that Stu was gay. I told him I was sure I would know if he was because we told each other everything. Aaron stood firm in his offer. It was starting to bug me that people kept saying this, as if it made our friendship not as deep as I thought it was.
I assured Aaron that Stu was just one of those people for whom sex wasn’t very important, and that’s why he didn’t talk about it much. Or at all. And it wasn’t like he had much free time; either he was with me, or at one of his many jobs. By day he worked at a mental health clinic, by night at a bookstore. Aaron said if Stu wasn’t gay, then it wasn’t right for me to be hanging out with another guy so much.
The only good thing to come out of this conversation was that I finally had a chance to tell someone not to let the door hit them on the way out.
By the time our friendship hit the one-year mark, Stu and I had learned to recognize each other’s quirks and habits. When I was crabby, he’d give me food; when he got tired, his left eye would start to droop and I’d make him turn out the light. I knew he blew his nose at least nine times a day, whether it needed it or not. He knew I had stashes of candy hidden in drawers all around my apartment. I knew he believed that the tree of life, which controls the universe and everyone in it, was actually behind a movie theater in Syosset, New York. He knew I believed that if I searched long enough, I would find buried pirate treasure. He gave me my most prized possessions: a tiny house made of twigs, perfect for a hobbit; a tiny castle made of clay that seemed to hold all the possibilities in the world; and a beautiful edition of the poem Desiderata. He was my standby date for parties and work-related events, and I was his. It was the perfect friendship, although a slight awkwardness arose when the topic of his love life came up. I never pushed it, because I knew that if he had a girlfriend, I wouldn’t see him as much.
After yet another nonpaid internship ended without a job offer, I decided it was time to give up on the entertainment industry for a while. After a few days of my wallowing in self-pity on the couch, Stu presented me with a copy of Writer’s Digest magazine, which listed graduate programs in creative writing. We pored through it, and found one at a university nearby. He helped me type up my application, and went as far as putting the stamps on the envelope that I was too nervous to mail myself.
Stu could be decisive about my life, but when it came to his own, he was paralyzed. I would buy something on a whim that I usually couldn’t afford, while Stu would spend months researching the best toaster oven, and then more months worrying that he got the wrong one. Stu always knew where his keys were; I never did. He never bought anything on credit; I used my Visa to pay off my MasterCard.
When Stu’s big, life-altering decision arose, he couldn’t make it. He paced like a man possessed, agonizing between going to one of the top graduate schools in the country for a doctorate in psychopharmacology, which was the main reason he had moved to Los Angeles in the first place, or attending a community college to get an associate degree in animal training and wildlife education, an option he had only learned of the week before. He described the two places—one a lab filled with florescent lights, test rats, and competitive grad students, the other a sun-filled oasis of exotic animals from all around the world that he would actually get to work with, one on one. He put the decision in my hands. I knew I would be breaking his mother’s heart, but I made the choice.
There would be no rat testing for Stu.
The week after both of our two-year programs ended, we went hiking together in Lake Tahoe to celebrate. We followed a path that led deep into the woods to a clearing where people were setting up picnics. We sat on the ground, our backs against a big tree, staring at the food others had been smart enough to bring. Stu picked up a stone and began scraping the bark, trying to draw sap out of it.
I asked, “Do you think that cloud looks like Homer Simpson?” and he replied, “I’m gay.”
It took me a second to realize his response wasn’t referring to the Homer cloud. When it sunk in, I put my head in my hands and said, “Crap. I owe Aaron a hundred dollars.”
To my relief, he laughed. He said I was the first and only person he’d told in his life, and that it was the hardest thing he’d ever done. As we sat there, watching the sap drip down the crevices of the bark, something changed between us. The last layer of an invisible wall came down. Never again would I have to defend our relationship to the guys I dated—or to my friends who said I was wasting my time on someone who I wasn’t going to wind up with. I gave him a long hug and could literally feel the tension drop from his shoulders.
On the way home, Stu was so electrified from our conversation that he bounced in his seat like a helium balloon. As we wound up and down the mountain roads, he poured out the story of the one guy he had dated, back in college. I listened, rapt, so excited finally to hear him talking this way. Lost in his memories, he didn’t see the edge of the cliff that was rapidly approaching. He kept talking about how the guy was cute but immature; as he started reminiscing about their first kiss, I yelled, “Turn, turn, turn!” Surprised, he quickly yanked the wheel around to the right. The tires squealed and dirt flew. The side of the mountain loomed, the way it does in the movies when you know the car is going over. I learned that your life actually does pass before your eyes. We skidded to a stop about twenty feet away from the edge and he turned off the car.
At first, we were too stunned to talk. Then with uncharacteristic seriousness, Stu said, “If we had died just then, it would have been okay because I finally told someone. Well, I would have felt bad for killing you, of course.”
The rest of the drive was quieter, each of us lost in our own thoughts. Any selfish resentment that I might have felt that he hadn’t told me earlier disappeared. Hearing him say he could die now, finally having released this secret, was a big wake-up call. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for him. I wished he had unburdened himself sooner, but he explained that it was a question of him accepting it himself first. Who could argue with that?
Not long after our trip, Stu started dating. At first he was tight on the details, but he gradually opened up more and more about the kinds of guys he was interested in and about gay culture in general. He now took pleasure in critiquing my boyfriends and telling me why they would never make it in the gay world, a world he complained was based too much on appearance. To fit in, Stu joined a gym, shed his chest hair, whitened his teeth, and started getting his hair cut in Beverly Hills instead of at Supercuts. I finally saw how much of himself he had kept hidden, and was so relieved he finally felt free to explore the missing part of his life.
For the next few years, I was his only friend who knew. I took this responsibility very seriously. I never told our mutual friends, nor did I pay my ex-boyfriend the one hundred dollars. At twenty-seven, I moved to New York for a job in publishing, the first of many moves between us over the next decade. Wherever we were, it was usually three thousand miles apart. In that time, we have traveled together on buses, trains, subways, cars, trolleys, trams, ferries, planes, Jet Skis, ski lifts, and cruise ships to see each other. Some visits are weeks long; others are only hours.
If Stu or I ever lose focus or get complacent, we kick each other back into gear. After we had both suffered particularly difficult breakups within a short period of time, he wrote me a letter that said, “Someday both of us will be exactly where we want to be, and it will only have been possible with all the unexpected twists and turns our lives have taken.”
It was hard to see it then, but I held on to those words and one day, twelve long years after Stu and I met, it hit me: I was finally exactly where I wanted to be. I hadn’t given up writing for kids, and my books were now on bookstore shelves. I had met the man I was going to marry. I finally had real furniture. Stu, who was becoming well-known and sought after for his work in wildlife education, had bought a house, and was living his dream of working at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando. Ever since we wrote short stories together in the late hours of the night, we knew we made a good writing team. Working long distance, we sold a story idea to a popular television show, and coauthored a book about fantasy literature. In every novel I have written, Stu has provided key turning points when I got stuck. I connected him with an editor who was looking for an authority on animals, and he has since published twelve books on animals and the environment. Without each other, we wouldn’t have taken the paths that led us to where we are today.
So when my mother slipped me the card of a rabbi to perform my wedding ceremony, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted Stu up there with me and my fiancé, Mike, and not just as an usher. In ten minutes, Stu got ordained on the Internet and was legal to perform weddings and funerals in forty-six states.
There we stood, Mike resplendent in his tux, me in the long white dress that made me feel like a Greek goddess, and Stu in the black robe that was actually a Matrix Halloween costume. After years of headlining shows at Disney, he was a seasoned public speaker who made us laugh and cry as he led us through the ceremony.
My husband and I sometimes joke about whether or not we’re truly married, but it was perfect and apparently fooled a lot of the guests. To this day, some of my parents’ friends tsk-tsk about the rabbi who messed up the Hebrew blessing over the wine.
The last time Stu and I saw each other was at The Cloisters in New York City. We took the guided tour through the medieval castle and gardens, but wound up whispering to each other the whole time. Whether the topic was the real possibility of time travel, the benefits of a high-fiber diet, a new book series we wanted to write together involving ancient books of magic, or the mystery of what keeps love alive, we could pause only long enough to briefly admire the ancient tapestries on the cool stone walls before one of us would think of something we couldn’t wait to share. Then Stu flew home to Florida, where he was to appear the next day on a Discovery Channel special, and I drove over the George Washington Bridge and back to my husband, twin babies, and impending book deadline. I knew, from years of experience, that the lump in my throat that came with each of our good-byes would last about an hour. Soon I’d be comforted that the universe would bring us together again, the way it always did, in ways I’d never have predicted.