“Eohhhhhh.”
This is how C. and I always greet each other: in a low, sardonic, world-weary sneer that succinctly encapsulates the good and bad that has accumulated over more than a decade of friendship like a pile of unread newspapers. It can be weeks since we’ve spoken on the phone—these days, when we live on opposite coasts, it’s usually months—but it’s always obvious who’s on the opposite end of the line.
“Eohhhhhh.”
My husband calls it the Café Pamplona voice, referring to the white-walled subterranean restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, frequented by pretentious, espresso-quaf.ng Harvard students, which C. and I used to be (“Speak for yourself!” he would say), and chain smokers, which C. was, until one day, shortly before he began medical school, when he gave up the habit with no fanfare whatsoever. I got the feeling he thought that people who needed a nicotine patch or hypnotism, addicted people, were morally weak. Another day, after he had become a surgery resident, he abruptly stopped eating meat, though not for any namby-pamby health reasons. “I like animals” was his nonproselytizing explanation. (Long before Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie made it chic, C. spent months in Namibia, researching the cheetah.)
We met in an entryway when I was a sophomore; he, a year older, had transferred from a small liberal-arts college in Vermont because he thought Harvard’s premed program was superior or, at least, more prestigious. We were both nursing heartbreak—we were always nursing heartbreak in those days—as we lugged our cardboard boxes into the large wood-paneled rooms with picture windows and working fireplaces that we’d been assigned in Adams House, the best undergraduate residential hall on campus. As we recently agreed, we’ve never had such good real-estate fortune before or since.
Back then, before the days of completely randomized living assignments, Adams was known for something other than its convenience to the Yard, its sumptuous library and billiard room, and its extravagantly tiled swimming pool: It was famous for its “artsiness.” Subtext: its friendliness to homosexuals. In years past, the swimming pool was rumored to have vibrated with bacchanalian orgies; now empty of water, it was an echoing performance space. That semester, the putative social committee printed black-and-pink T-shirts bearing a mischievous cartoon face and the phrase: “Adams House: We’re all gay and we’re coming to get you.”
There was a crushed-velvet decadence to the place; its dark corridors always smelled faintly like gin and clove cigarettes. But as C. pointed out to me on the phone, “Compared with other people’s college experiences, it was actually kind of innocent.” During countless parties in those wood-paneled rooms, classmates munched not tabs of LSD but strawberries dipped in chocolate; drank not Long Island iced teas but champagne. They stripped down to their underwear and danced to Madonna and Prince. One crisp autumn night, mysterious and benevolent forces planned and executed an elaborate Disco Masquerave Ball in the dining hall. There was also an annual official spring waltz with ice sculptures, a string orchestra, and red rose petals scattered on the floor. It was archaic. It was ridiculous. It was wonderful.
Most of those living in Adams House, as opposed to the rest of the country at that point in time—the Bush pere early-early 1990s—considered it cool to be gay or bisexual; it only enhanced a straight person’s reputation to hook up with someone of the same sex. “All those kookaloos,” C. said, sighing gustily as we minced down memory lane together. “I finally felt like I belonged, for the first time in my life.” He had grown up in suburban New Hampshire. I was born and raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a place that, as everyone knows, can be more provincial than Toledo, all flaxen-haired mothers in headbands and plaid skirts gathering at the church craft fair, their private-schooled daughters—Emily or Elizabeth—in tow, trailing muffin crumbs.
One of my own mom’s friends, a renowned composer, was gay, but to my sheltered young self that was an exceedingly vague designation, perhaps indicating a fancy penthouse apartment with a white shag rug and a pair of pampered cats for companionship. Later, attending a progressive public high school, my knowledge of homosexuality was inextricably intertwined with education about AIDS and how to avoid it. Tragic figures like the actor Rock Hudson, whom I’d watched on Dynasty; the artist Keith Haring, with his boppy graffiti and sculptures; and nightlife impresario Steve Rubell of Studio 54 and the Palladium shared a free condom-strewn continuum in my subconscious. But these were just glossy abstractions till I reached Harvard’s hallowed halls, where C. told me everything I had never known I wanted to know about gay male culture from the (apparently quite sticky) ground up: About what went on in the bathrooms of the Science Center. About poppers and hummers and glory holes and twinks. Barebacking, beards, and bears, oh my! About the fellatio that tall, lumberjack-looking guy with a girlfriend had administered one night to that slight, dark, perpetually hungry-looking visual and environmental studies major.
“Really?” God, I was so naive.
“I enjoyed your curiosity,” my ambassador of alternate behavior said reassuringly, years later. “I felt sort of predatory or parasitic in college, going and soaking up everyone else’s experiences and abilities, taste in clothes and books and socializing styles, and this made me feel like I had something to give in exchange. Something to bring to the table.”
But what did I bring to the table? “You told me all about kosher food,” C. said, laughing.
I am only half Jewish. My father didn’t even have a bar mitzvah. To the best of my recollection, I didn’t eat a single matzoh ball until I met my husband. But apparently, that was plenty Jewish enough. “I had known people from New York City, but they had gone away to prep school—I didn’t know anybody who had gone to high school there,” C. said. “It seemed very exotic and sophisticated to me.”
Judging from appearances, though, C. was the more sophisticated one by far. Tall, dark, and handsome, with the high-cheekboned, melancholic-eyed, between-the-World-Wars look of a young Jeremy Irons, he was the perfect escort and the perfect ear when we were both between boyfriends, easily passing as straight when I needed him to make a prospective conquest jealous from across the room. Oh, the ridiculous tableaux we staged! When I was involved with someone, C. and his vicious gay circle provided merciful comic relief from a relationship’s daily emotional roller-coaster rides. One day over lunch (Chickwiches and Constant Comment tea, no doubt), he looked at me, the only woman at the table, and triumphantly pronounced, “Fag hag!”
That was it. I had arrived.
Yet ours was never one of those double-snappin’, Cosmo-swillin’, shoe-shoppin’ gay man–straight woman relationships depicted ad nauseam in popular culture. Nor was C. constantly administering Carson Kressley–style makeovers on my then lamentable wardrobe of flannel L.L. Bean shirts, Levi’s, and hiking boots. He was far too masculine for that. He was obsessed with sports cars and airplanes and traveled often, with barely more than a toothbrush. He never cared much about what he was wearing, and in recent years has tended toward the tracksuits favored by Cinnabon-chomping Midwesterners suffering through long layovers in municipal airports. I was horrified when he shaved his head in tribute to his pop-music idol, Sinead O’Connor. I think he’s even watched football from time to time.
If we had anything in common, it was our tremendous inner reserves of dorkiness. As a teenager I’d played the viola, taking the humiliating instrument on the crosstown bus twice a week to two successive different Upper West Side music schools; C., meanwhile, was lugging an enormous double bass through his own New Hampshire high-school cafeteria, where he was shunned by the people at the popular table.
All right, in college I was still playing the viola, as little as possible while still maintaining membership in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, an affiliation that pleased my musician parents. (They were, after all, paying the tuition.) The spring after C. and I met, this organization announced a tour of Eastern Europe.
“Go!” my parents said delightedly. I quivered in dread, wishing for a normal summer job, filing papers in a law office, lifeguarding, anything…
In a generous show of solidarity, C. announced that he would join H.R.O. in time for the trip. Together we would skip over the Charles Bridge in Prague, visit the Judenplatz in Vienna, take a relaxing soak in the famous baths of Budapest. For a few weeks he gamely showed up at rehearsals, ninety long minutes made suddenly bearable by our making faces at each other between pizzicati. At the last minute, the plan collapsed like the Berlin Wall, thanks to the merciless premed curriculum. After a miserable summer without him, touring the aforementioned sights en masse in air-conditioned motor coaches, subsisting on giant bowlfuls of post-Communist potatoes and phone calls home, I, too, finally found the courage to quit.
On another vacation, C. drove me to his parents’ house for a taste of the suburban life. Now that was exotic. Burgers from the drive-through, an evening at the local multiplex (I fainted during a showing of Aliens II, occasioning a dramatic rendezvous with the local fire department in the theater lobby as C. obliviously masticated a bucket of popcorn inside), and—in one concession to the stereotype he never embodied—listening to his mother’s Barbra Streisand records.
Like most dorks, we could be exceptionally cruel to those even lower on the totem pole. Perhaps the hardest I’d ever laughed in my life was the sun-dappled afternoon we spent pawing through my roommate’s wardrobe, donning her teal vests and mimicking her Elaine Benes–style dance steps. Talk about hiding in the closet! We dripped with disdain for frat boys in baseball caps, for people who took too long at the ATM machines, for students sitting anxiously scribbling in class on the first day. “I hope the syllabus isn’t too onerous,” we mocked in our Café Pamplona voice.
It wasn’t all acerbic bliss, of course. C. was always scornful of my majoring in literature, which he believed was mere entertainment. Senior year, he told me I would look “better in jeans” if I lost a few pounds. (“He’s a gay man,” a mutual friend reminded me. “They’re not usually that into hips.”) Once, a relative of mine—I am ashamed to say which—voiced concern that fraternizing with C. might result in my somehow getting HIV. (“How?” I hollered at the heavens.) Then there was the time C. “had relations,” as they say, with an ex-boyfriend. Somehow, it didn’t bother me nearly as much as a similar transgression by a female friend. Was that homophobic in some way, I asked him, using the politically correct patois of our age? Not really to “count” what had happened? “No,” C. said. Our relationship, he said, had always been free of the competitiveness I felt toward women, or any sexual tension I might have had with straight men. This is why it worked.
When I began planning my wedding, half a dozen years after we graduated, C. complained that he couldn’t get married, implying that I should’ve eschewed the institution’s dubious privileges on principle (again, he was way ahead of Brad and Angelina). But there were no earnest boycotts; he sent over a shiny red KitchenAid mixer and a congratulatory note, put on his old tuxedo, and showed up to the party. He was the best-looking man—besides the groom, of course—and certainly the best dancer. (I got the feeling we both relished revisiting the Adamsian revelry of yore.) In one of the delicious life twists that it seems only New York City can hand you, his date was someone I’d known in high school.
When I announced plans to have a baby, C. expressed dismay that I was about to become a breeder, trying to get me to explain logically—he is unfailingly logical—why I wanted to reproduce when the planet was overpopulated and my life was perfectly full already. But I couldn’t. There’s little that’s logical about deciding to have children. And for that matter, there’s little that’s arch or sarcastic about little people, either.
It was a difficult pregnancy, and C.’s interest in the gory details was crisp, impersonal—like the new M.D. he was. I was grateful for his coolheaded counsel, and yet—
Then he came West to visit me in Los Angeles and met my baby daughter for the first time.
“Eohhhhhh,” he cooed.
I laughed. And so did she.