JOHN DID go to work and found people looking at him… funny. Especially Janet, his assistant. He’d look out the glass wall of his office and see her there at her desk, peering at him curiously over her glasses.
It was while she was taking a letter that he asked her what was up.
Her cheeks pinked a bit, and then she burst out with a, “That’s what we’ve been wondering.”
John leaned forward on his desk. “We? What’s going on, Janet?” People were wondering about him?
She looked down and then up, down, and then up again. “You’re so… happy.”
John sat upright. Happy?
“I mean, you’ve been so… well, solemn since Mrs. Williams vanished into the night.”
John gulped. “Ah… Janet…. Vivian, Mrs. Williams, didn’t exactly ‘vanish into the night.’”
She gave a little shrug. “She left. Which is crazy. I can’t imagine why any woman would be so stupid.”
John gulped again. What?
“I mean, we all think that you’re, like, the best boss we’ve ever had. You’re a good man, Mr. Williams, and you’re fair. And….” Her cheeks got a little pinker. “You’re very handsome. Anyone would be lucky to have you.”
Now it was John’s turn to blush. He could feel the heat on his cheeks and hoped it wasn’t too noticeable. “Why… thank you, Janet.”
Her eyes went wide behind her fashionable glasses. “Not that I… I mean… I’m happily married, Mr. Williams. It’s just. Well. The girls talk.” She smiled. “And one or two of the boys too. And they all agree that she—Mrs. Williams—must be crazy.”
Well, she thought I was boring, Janet. I probably was. I know I was. She left to see the world. And have three-ways.
Then he saw Blue’s upturned ass in his mind, waiting for him, and he really did flush so hard he knew his cheeks were blazing. Something happened in his pants, and he tried to think about Blue’s face instead—which wasn’t difficult, Blue had the most beautiful face in the universe. If you could see me now, Vivian.
He wished her the best. He wished her fine cabana boys with butts as nice as Blue’s and safe travels and climbs to the top of one of the Mexican pyramids they still let you climb and hoped she was fleshing in Bangkok to her heart’s content—if that’s what she wanted. He found he wished her not the slightest ill will. Vivian had been unhappy.
And he’d come to see that he had been as well.
That he’d never been truly happy.
And now he was.
Happier than he’d ever been in his life.
How could he wish her anything else?
Wait. Had Janet just said one or two guys found him attractive?
He smiled shyly and wondered which ones. Not that he was interested in them. But how had he missed that? How had he missed that men were attracted to him?
Blinders, he supposed. He had spent his life looking straight forward—ever since that night in college—and never to the left or right except when it came to business.
Viv had really had a host of reasons to have been so unhappy.
John found he really did wish he could see Vivian. See her and wish her well.
He looked across his desk at Janet—whose chair was at the same level as his because he’d never believed in that bullshit of having a big chair so that he was above the people who came to see him, figuratively or physically—and she gazed back and then asked, “You seeing someone, Mr. Williams?”
And John grinned. That fast. He couldn’t help it.
“I—well, yes I am, Janet.”
Her smile was huge. “Oh, that is good news! We were afraid—or I was at least—that you’d mope around here forever. Where’d you meet the lucky lady?”
John opened his mouth, shut it, and found himself flummoxed. He could lie. It would be so easy. Hell, he could tell half the truth. I met her at an animal shelter. I was thinking of getting a dog. I found a human instead.
But he thought of Blue smiling at him across the dinner table or cuddled up in the crook of his arm watching television—they’d watched Avatar again last night, this time with the extra footage, and Blue had loved it—or asleep next to him in bed and found saying such a thing would be a betrayal. The idea hurt his heart.
And hadn’t she told him that a couple of men thought he was attractive? Hadn’t she said it without blinking an eye, as if it were the most normal thing in the world?
Before he could think about it too much, he said, “Guy, Janet.”
She looked at him curiously.
His heart skipped a beat, and whether it was the image of Blue’s smiling face or a bit of fear (maybe both?), he said, “A guy. I met a man. I was thinking of getting a dog, and I went to this animal shelter and found a human being instead. And I’m the lucky one.”
Her mouth opened halfway, and it was clear she was surprised. But then she gave a nod and a little gulp and smiled as if the sun had come out on a rainy day. “Wow! That’s wonderful, Mr. Williams!”
“Surprised?” he asked. Because I sure was. “I was as surprised as hell.”
“A bit. Let no one say you’ve ever acted even a little light in your loafers. But I think it’s great. Chad will be crushed—” She covered her mouth and ducked her head, an “Ooops!” if John had ever seen one.
Chad? Chad Harris? Really? He thought of the man, curly hair and big glasses, and realized the idea that Chad was gay had never occurred to him. Not that anybody’s anything had ever concerned him.
“Don’t tell him I told you, Mr. Williams!”
“That he’s gay?” he asked.
She rolled her eyes. “No! Who can miss that Chad is gay?”
Apparently me.
“No. That he has a crush on you.”
A crush. An actual crush?
John gulped.
Took a deep breath.
“Then maybe we should keep me getting involved—
(Falling in love)
—with a man between you and me. Just for now.”
She nodded and looked at him very seriously. “Sure, Mr. Williams.”
At least until I’m fully ready.
And thinking again of Blue cuddled next to him on the couch, John thought maybe that wouldn’t be too long from now.
AND BLUE? Why, for Blue life was grand. Wonderful. Wonderous.
He didn’t know when he’d ever been so fucking happy.
Living with John was like… like playing house. And he tried not to hope too hard that it wasn’t only playing.
Could a man twice his age—so smart and sophisticated and worldly—stay interested in him?
But as each day passed and John didn’t seem to lose interest, Blue found it harder and harder to keep his resolve to hold John with an open hand.
They did so much together!
They went to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and what a delight it was when they shared what they knew about the art instead of each seeing it just one way. Blue had learned a lot taking notes for students after all. He knew more about the queerness of world art while John knew the history. One day they had sat cross-legged on the floor for what seemed like forever looking up at the Nelson’s wooden figure of Guanyin of the Southern Sea, which was famous for being the finest sculpture of its kind outside China. John knew that it had probably been stolen, and Blue knew that it wasn’t really female.
“See?” Blue had pointed. “No breasts? This was back when the bodhisattva was transitioning from male to female for those cultures that needed a goddess figure.”
And John knew all about Emperor Hadrian and the power he had brought to Rome but hadn’t known that the Roman ruler was gay and that the beautiful bust of the male youth that faced him across one gallery of the museum was his lover, Antinous. Hadrian had deified him after he died. “Antinous was much younger than Hadrian.”
“How much younger?” John, curious, asked the much-younger Blue.
“Well,” Blue said, and then his mind did that thing it did, recalling information that he’d learned before as if from some file opened and read. It was something he’d never understood. “Antinous was nineteen when he died, and Hadrian was sixty-two. They were thirty-four years apart.”
Thirty-four years! John thought, and suddenly the twenty-some years between them mattered just a little bit less.
“How about Samuel Johnson and Elizabeth Johnson? They were married in 1735 when he was twenty-five and she was forty-six. Twenty-one-year age difference. Or Rebecca Rolfe, who we know as Pocahontas, and John Rolfe, married in 1614. She was eighteen, and he was twenty-nine, eleven-year age difference. King Willem III and Emma of Waldeck. Married in 1879. She was twenty-one and he was sixty-two. Forty-one-year age difference.”
Uh-oh. It was happening. The file had been opened! The horses were out of the barn. Soon they would start galloping. And when was it going to stop?
“King William IV and Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen,” he continued, the words flowing faster and faster. “Married in 1818. She was twenty-six and he was fifty-three. Twenty-seven-year age difference. Grover Cleveland and Frances Folsom. Married in 1886. She was twenty-one and he was forty-nine. Twenty-eight-year age difference.”
Stop talking! Stop talking before he knows you for how weird you are.
“And that is heterosexual couples. Men? Well, there was a male couple of Ancient Greece: Nero—not the crazy Roman one—and Sporus. They were married in 67 AD. Sporus was somewhere around seventeen years old and Nero was around thirty, sixteen-year age difference. More recently, of course, there was Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. Met in 1891. Oscar was thirty-seven and Alfred was twenty-one. Sixteen-year age difference. And Noel Coward and Graham Payne? They met in 1942. Noel was forty-three andGrahamwastwentyfournineteenyearagedifferenceand—”
And just when he was losing it completely, John reached out and took Blue’s cheek in the palm of his hand and said, “God,” and sighed happily. “You know all this stuff! You are so smart.”
And Blue was back on Earth—himself again.
Smart?
John had just called him smart?
His heart pounded harder by far than anytime a man had told him he was sexy.
John stepped forward and leaned down so their foreheads were touching. “I am so proud of you.”
Blue all but melted.
“Isn’t that nice?” came the voice of a woman. Blue broke their hold and saw a woman who had to be in at least her seventies with a much older man. “Isn’t it nice when a father and son can express their affection in public?” She smiled at them.
“Oh, but we’re n—”
Blue squeezed John’s hand.
And then the old lady’s eyes went wide, and she winked and bobbed her head in the older man’s direction. Without another word the couple went on ahead of them into the Medieval Hall.
“So you can stop worrying about the difference in our age, okay?”
“Okay,” John said. “But we’re equals.”
It was all Blue could do not to cry. Equals. He nodded, not knowing if he trusted himself to speak.
The days flew by.
Mornings started with John taking Chewie out—despite Blue’s argument that they were equals after all. He wasn’t weak. He could do it—and ended the same way. John insisted.
“You can take him out while I’m at work,” John said.
Chewie seemed to love the spoiling.
And when John wasn’t at work, they did the things they could do and not be away from home for long. For the most part, home was where they stayed. They watched movies and played games—cards and otherwise—and Blue whipped John’s ass at chess.
They gardened, something John had been interested in but never taken up. That had been Vivian’s domain, something she wanted to do by herself. But she was gone now, and the gardens out back needed care, and Blue was thrilled. They went to local nurseries and downtown to the City Market and picked out plants and flowers together and planted them together.
Museums were a big part of what took them away from the house. They went to the American Jazz and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museums. John had a love for jazz that he delighted in sharing with Blue, and Blue knew baseball. Vivian had hated baseball, mostly because of the length of the season.
This only led to John and Blue heading to several games.
And they went to the ballet. John had dreamed of going (secretly) for years (something else Vivian did with her female friends. “Imagine, a man wanting to go to the ballet!”) Pretty much all he’d had the opportunity to see before that was The Nutcracker at the Kansas City Music Hall, dance routines in musicals at the Starlight Theater, and many late-night secret viewings on YouTube.
And then there was the fun of dressing Blue up. They’d had to go and buy a suit of course.
“Do I really need one?” Blue had asked. “I’m sure I’ve got something I can wear.”
“I’m sure you do,” John said. “But you’d look beautiful in a tux.”
Blue’s eyes had gone wide at that. “A tuxedo?” he’d whispered. As if it were a magic word. “I can’t really afford a—”
“I’ve got it,” John told him.
Blue shook his head. “No, John. You’ve been paying for everything and I’m starting to feel like some kind of kept boy. Tuxedos aren’t cheap, and they’re something you wear once in a blue moon and—”
John sucked in a breath. God. Making Blue feel bad was the last thing he’d wanted. “Blue. Let me do this. I really want to. You should see all the crap I’ve bought for Vivian. Have you peeked in that walk-in closet? There must be a hundred pair of shoes in there. If I can pay for a pair of Alexander Wangs for her, I can buy you a simple tuxedo. Hell. The tux will probably be cheaper.”
Blue bit his lip. And finally nodded.
It had made John very happy.
And it was surprisingly sexy to get Blue fitted. It was all John could do not to pull Blue into a booth and take the thing off him. Blue would be more than happy for him to. But as far as John had come, he wasn’t quite ready for that.
So John bought Blue the tuxedo and then they went to the ballet.
John loved it.
And so had Blue.
“My God,” he’d whispered in John’s ear. “It’s like they’re floating. It’s like they’re… oooh, look! Like they’ve just stopped in midair!”
It was a big step when John accepted Janet’s dinner invitation. He asked Blue, who was shy but all for it, and they went. Thankfully it was just Janet and her husband and one other couple who were surprisingly also far apart in age—although they were a straight couple. A man who had to be in his sixties with a wife no older than thirty. It made everything very comfortable. The only odd thing that happened was that the wife, a woman named Amélie—
“Like the movie?” Blue asked.
“Oui,” she answered in a delightful French accent.
—kept looking at Blue and swearing she had seen him before. But try as they might, they couldn’t figure out where.
And for those times they were out late?
Well, Mom watched Chewie.
After the three of them had their dinner date, that was.
JOHN GRILLED, but Blue did everything else while he was at work. Miriam arrived on time, and she brought two bottles of wine. “A red and white,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what you were grilling.”
They opened both.
And Blue was thrilled.
Because the evening was a hit.
“You’re bisexual, then, John?” Miriam asked.
“No. I don’t think so. I’m gay.”
“You know, just because you’re madly in love,” she said and sipped from her wine, “doesn’t mean you have to forgo being bisexual. There is such a thing, you know. As bisexuality, that is.”
John shrugged and gave her a lopsided smile. “I guess?”
“I’m bisexual,” she declared.
His brows shot up but then settled gently. “Okay.”
“So there’s nothing wrong….”
“Maybe I am in some degree,” John replied. “I was sexual with my wife for twenty years. But there was no… passion. It wasn’t bad. Just not….” He looked at Blue. “Miriam, the first time Blue and I kissed—hell, that first time we met when he barely kissed me on the cheek—it was like… like nothing I’d ever felt before. Ever experienced before!”
She eyed him.
“I was reading this story in this book once. It was this story about Socrates, I think. Or Plato? He was talking about these people who had lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a wall, and all they’d ever been able to do was watch shadows projected on that wall. The shadows were all they ever knew. And then one day they were freed from the cave and marveled that the shadows they’d seen on the wall did not make up reality at all. But once they’d seen the truth, they couldn’t go back. I read that and thought about what’s happening to me now that I’ve been with Blue. I didn’t know reality. I could only go by what I’d read or what I feared. And now? Now I see that I’m not straight and I’m not bisexual. I’m gay. Now that I see it, I can’t unsee it. And I know a woman won’t come along that can make me feel these things. I know I never gave my wife the passion that she deserved. I want to do that for Blue. I want to do that so damned bad. I’m worried a bit. Scared to take the full plunge. Coming out is the term, right? I’m not ready to march in a parade. But I want to give Blue all the passion in my heart.”
Miriam fanned herself. “Oh my!” She looked over at Blue. “What did I say about holding on to this one?”
Blue grinned.
“I think the biggest thing that still gets me is our difference in age. Blue’s teaching me. All about Hadrian and Antinous, Pocahontas and John Rolfe, Grover Cleveland and Frances Folsom, and Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, but….”
“I’m not at all bothered by the age thing,” she said with a wave. “I hung out with the beatniks in California way back when.” She turned to Blue. “Did I ever tell you I knew Allen Ginsberg?”
Blue shook his head. “Really?”
John obviously hadn’t heard of him and asked who he was.
“Amazing poet,” she said. “He wrote a book of poetry called Howl and Other Poems in 1955.” She shook her head. “Whoo-wee, did that ever cause a stir. When he published it, it got him arrested for obscenity. Went to trial too. Very homosexual—emphasis on sexual.”
“Really?” John asked, obviously surprised.
“I have an autographed copy in the house,” she said, pride clear in her voice. “First printing. Got it at City Lights Books the day it came out.” She nodded and smiled wistfully. “I knew a lot of those people. Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, James Broughton. I was a dancer. We were all artists. Artistes, as some people said.” She cackled, and as usual with her, the sound was delightful. “We danced and performed and made movies and thought we were changing the world.” Then she sighed and looked out into the distance.
“You’ve met some famous people,” John said, and Blue could see he was impressed, and that made him happy. Mom was not your average lady.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “But it was James Broughton I wanted to tell you about, the Big Joy himself. I was in several of his films. Some of them were terrible and some a total delight. I have a copy of The Bed, which was nothing but nudity—but tasteful and delightfully innocent. He couldn’t find anyone to develop it and finally had to go to a porn company. I was not in that one!” Again she laughed, and again she seemed to go off into another world as she spoke. “It made him famous on the West Coast!
“And holy shit, I loved James’s poetry!” She sat back, closed her eyes, smiled blissfully, and then began to recite.
Big Joy have mercy upon us
Deliver us from dread
from fret funk and glum
scowl sneer and fidget
Big Joy have pity upon us
Deliver us from droop
from flinch fuss and squirm
sham shame and dither
Big Joy shed grace upon us
Deliver us from daunt
from whine whimper and pout
chafe vex and blooper
O Big Joy rescue us
from the petty the inane
the vacuous the mediocre
and the triumphantly stupid
WITH THAT she laughed, bobbed her head back and forth happily, opened her eyes and rolled them, and said, “Gods! That is so James!”
She sighed once more and drank from her wineglass and seemed to come back to reality. Were there tears in her eyes? Mom? Tears?
Then she was looking at them both, pointing wildly with her glass but not coming close to spilling a drop of her wine. “But the point. This wine has made me miss the point! What I wanted to say was that James didn’t meet Joel Singer, the love of his life, until he was sixty-two. Delightful young man! Who was forty years James’s junior. They were together forever after that too. I think Joel kept James young, although Joel might have said it was the other way around. They were such a joyful couple. I envied them.”
Blue giggled happily—he couldn’t help it—and looked at John, and to his surprise, he saw tears in John’s eyes.
“John?” he asked.
John shook himself, grabbed a cloth napkin, and wiped at his face, and they both caught Mom looking at them. Her expression? Why, bliss. Big joy, Blue thought.
Later, after she left, that’s what John replied. “Joy.”
“Big joy,” Blue said.
Of course, they were both stoned to the gills.
Miriam had insisted. “I got something here that will make your socks switch feet without you moving to help!”
John, bless his heart, joined them, and from what he said, he had never even indulged in college. Luckily he didn’t have to drive. And luckily he didn’t have to work the next day. Luckily Chewie was on the patio and could get to the lawn to pee on his own by then. Luckily he’d been sleeping downstairs of late, and they wouldn’t have to carry him upstairs. And luckily that sock-switching pot produced some of the best sex Blue had ever had.
And from the moans and groans and exclamations, it seemed to be true for John as well.
IT WAS.
It was about the best sex John had ever had, and he’d had some pretty incredible sex lately. Now that he was having sex with—what was for him—the right gender.
Who knew sex could be so fantastic?
Who knew touching could be so grand?
That being touched could be so intense?
That orgasms could be so powerful?
He also decided—and thankfully Blue agreed—that smoking pot should be a sometime thing instead of a normal thing (despite the fact that Miriam told them she could help them grow an excellent plant behind the lilac bushes along John’s back fence).
Because John wanted their sex to be real. No additives. No alterations.
Because it was perfect as it was.
A symbol of their love.
Love.
He was in love!
But he thought that maybe what had made the evening so perfect, and maybe why the lovemaking had been so grand, was Miriam’s story about James Broughton and Joel Singer. How Joel was the love of James’s life and how late in that life it had been when he met Joel. How James kept Joel young as much as Joel had kept James young.
It was one thing to think about Hadrian and Antinous, or Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. But they were so long ago. They lived in worlds where an age difference was common. Today was a different world.
James and Joel bridged that chasm for some reason, had set his heart free. He’d felt it take wing. Felt a weight lift off his shoulders!
Big Joy have pity upon us
Deliver us from droop
from flinch fuss and squirm
sham shame and dither
Tonight John felt as if he might have finally let go of shame and was fully ready for Big Joy….
AND SO April went into May and into June.
It was magic.
It was Big Joy.
And soon not a day passed that John didn’t tell Blue that he loved him, and thank God—that ephemeral being—Blue loved him back.
Because there must be a God, right?
A God who invented love.
And created Blue.
And put him in his life.
Those months were all Big Joy.
At least until the end of June. Two days before Chewie had his cast taken off.
That was when the trouble happened.