The Reluctant Receptionist

Drive-by

I steadied the camera on the steering wheel, certain that I could use it as a tripod since I wasn’t going to have to turn the wheel anytime soon. Driving with my mother up I-35 from Oklahoma City to Wichita, I could count the curves in the road on two hands. I’d forgotten what it felt like to drive 80 miles an hour in this kind of open space, what the prairie looked like as the late afternoon sun began to set, stretching the shadow of the car in front of us like rubber. New York City had a lot of things: shows and parties every night of the week, more gay guys than Oklahoma had people. But it didn’t have this: open space, room to breathe.

Keeping my mother’s car in our lane, I lined up the shot that I wanted then clicked it as it came into frame. In front of us, as far as the eye could see, stretched I-35, the road I’d traveled up and down so many times as a child. To the right, barely legible unless you squinted, a green sign pointed Eastward, proclaiming the exit for Ponca City, my hometown. Exiting here would take us past the strange insulated water tower that my childhood imagination thought looked like a giant toasted marshmallow, past the winter feed silos and the country radio station, and eventually past the oil refinery, with its dirty, sulfuric smell and towering orange flame. “That means that somebody messed up,” my mother would tell us when the refinery’s flame was high, “because they’re burning a lot of stuff off.” I never questioned how she knew this; I blindly accepted it as a fact, like the water tower that was a giant marshmallow.

“What are you taking a picture of?” my mother asked, as I turned off my camera and put it into the storage space behind the gearshift.

“Just some pictures to send to Paul,” I told her, and we settled back into silence, speeding toward my parents’ new home in Wichita. I didn’t know why I wanted to send my boyfriend a picture of the exit to my hometown, why I cared that he see where I was from. I knew that I’d probably never convince him to go to Ponca City, especially now that I didn’t have any family there. The most that I could rationally expect would be for him to someday visit my family wherever they were living. But still, the longing was there, a thought that he might somehow know me a little better if he were to see what I’d come from. The life that we had together in New York City was so wildly different from the life that I’d known growing up that it seemed as if they were two separate entities, as if the man I’d become, living with my boyfriend and going to parties and performances, were someone different than the one I’d left in a small town in Oklahoma ten years earlier.

I knew that I wasn’t a different person, though, which was part of the reason I cared that Paul see my hometown. It would be a way to show him the first half of my life, a way to include him in that part, too. I’d take him to the house my parents just left and my music teacher’s house in the country. I’d take him to the scenic overlook where I sat smoking cigarettes with my friend Brock, the one who killed himself this year. I’d say, “This used to be me. This run-down strip mall, this row of chain restaurants, this is what I knew of the world when I was growing up.”

For now, though, I’d settle for a picture of an off-ramp sent through email. It was a start.

The Date

Well, this is it, I thought, looking in the mirror and adjusting the collar of my sweater, the one that I’d just brought back from an army/navy store in London. After months of heady, increasingly handsy flirtation, Christopher had finally invited me over to his house for a drink. Never mind that I was a sophomore and he was a senior; never mind that he said he was straight. The signals he was sending were anything but mixed, having escalated from winking at me to pulling me into a bear hug to pulling me onto his lap. Straight or gay, the way Christopher flirted with me was so old-fashioned it was almost cliched.

Besides, everyone at school said that they were straight, to my great disappointment. I’d come to college expecting to finally be with other gay people, looking for the community that hadn’t existed in the small Oklahoma town in which I’d grown up. What I’d found instead was a conservative college in a dying little town 45 minutes down the interstate from Indianapolis. There were a total of two gay guys and two lesbians, and a poorly-attended GLBT group that met in a dorm lounge. When it came to datable guys, my options were limited: I could drive to Indianapolis or I could lust after straight boys. I held out hope that maybe, just maybe, Christopher was one of the many guys at my college who weren’t straight after all. I’d never understood it, having been openly gay since high school, but DePauw was filled with guys like this, people who were scared into the closet by their fraternity or their family.

When I walked across campus it was dark and unusually quiet, the cold having chased people inside. My breath clouded out in front of me, thick and white in the porch light as I waited for Christopher to come to the door. It’s not like I’m new at this, I thought, feeling my heartbeat in my neck, my numb ears thudding with nerves. Am I really so hard up that I have to go after some straight guy? Christopher answered his door shoeless in jeans and a turtleneck sweater, carrying a glass of red wine that was filled to the brim, his teeth and lips already stained purple. This was the curse of the college-aged wine drinker: to aim for sophistication but land at binge drinking, downing magnums of Ernest and Julio Gallo instead of cases of Natural Light.

“Hey, Robert,” he said with a wink, “it’s great that you came over. I’m really glad. We’re back here.”

We? I thought. When Christopher had invited me over there had certainly been no “we.” There had been me and him, drinking wine at his house. I suddenly felt ridiculous, a desperate 20-year-old who’d put on his best pants and favorite sweater and trudged across campus to try and seduce a straight guy. I was just a kid who took himself too seriously, who always read too much into the signals that people didn’t know they were sending, who was grasping at straws.

“This is Jesse,” Christopher said, introducing me to his friend, a floppy-haired post-grad who had come back to visit.

“Hey, nice to meet you,” I said, reading the surprise that flashed across Jesse’s face. Apparently I wasn’t the only gay guy who thought I was going to be having a one-on-one evening with Christopher.

“You too,” he said, obviously annoyed. He handed me a glass and filled it with wine, spilling a little down the side of the bottle. He set it down, looking from Christopher to me, and let it stain a purple circle on the table.

So this was Christopher’s game, I realized: surrounding himself with guys that wanted him but keeping himself consistently out of reach. Making himself the center of attention, watching as people jockeyed for his affection. If I’d been five years older, a little more jaded or a little more ballsy, Jesse and I would’ve left Christopher’s together. Instead, I sat there and got drunk on Christopher’s cheap red wine, listening to him and Jesse rehash old times, smiling at their stories when it was appropriate, frowning with concentration when I needed to. I walked back to my dorm, fuzzy from all of the wine, took off my sweater, and dropped it onto the floor.

Paint it, white

“What the hell were we thinking, painting the walls this color?” Adam asked me, laying the roller he’d been using down on the drop-cloth. A year before, we’d spent hours painting our apartment, meticulously painting brown and tan stripes, measuring and taping every single one so that they’d be perfect. Now, though, we were painting over all of that, covering our handiwork with the cheap white paint that Adam had brought home from the hardware store. We were moving out and wanted to get our deposit back. The paint we’d used for the stripes was so dark that we were having to paint layer after layer, going back three or four times after it had dried.

“I’m not the one that bought this cheap paint,” I said, picking up the roller and starting to work again.

“No,” he said, “but you’re the one that wanted to paint it in the first place. I was perfectly happy to have white walls, but you wanted to try and make it homey even though we weren’t going to be here for that long.” He sucked in a little breath, as if trying to call back into his mouth what he’d just let escape, and his face softened a little. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You know what I meant.”

This was the way it so often went after Adam and I broke up: I’d push him to the edge, needling him until he finally exploded, letting out the frustration and anger and sadness he’d kept bundled up since he’d started sleeping on the couch. I knew exactly what I was doing—I wanted him to yell and scream, to somehow show me that he was as upset as I was. He’d broken up with me, and I was going to be damned if I let him get away without a fight.

But he was right, after all: I had been the one who’d insisted on painting the place, talking about it and planning until Adam had finally given in and driven us to Home Depot. For a week, we came home every day after work and did a little more until, at the end of it, I sat down on our couch and looked around, his cat sleeping with her head in my lap, and thought, This is the home I always thought I’d have. I was settling down, trading a life of debauched nights for a life with a man and a cat and walls that were painted brown. Then, a year later, I’d beaten Adam home and started painting, detailing the hard-to-reach spot above the picture window, listening to Patty Griffin’s “Rowing Song” on repeat until he’d gotten home.

Adam took the roller from me, dipped it into the tray, and swiped a wide swath of white onto the wall. “I know that this sucks,” he said, without turning to face me, “but we have to do it.” I sat down on the bed, which had been moved to the middle of the room, and looked around: there were boxes underneath the drop-cloth, ready for Adam to take to Chicago and for me to take across the street. From where I sat, I could see our reflection in the mirror, shirtless and splotched with paint as if we’d just been in some screwball paint-fight scene in a sitcom, only neither of us was laughing.

I watched Adam push and pull the roller against the wall, the muscles in his wiry back tensing and releasing, and I knew that he was as disappointed as I was with the way that everything had turned out. But he was doing what he had to do.

“Excuse me,” I said to the woman, a pushy 40-something woman who had just shoved herself onto the train as I was trying to exit. I had many pet peeves about living in New York City—rich women on 5th Avenue who walked their yapping miniature dogs with their leashes fully extended, tripping every pedestrian in their path; subway drivers who merrily honked their horns and then sped up as they raced through the station where I stood shivering—but this woman’s offense was probably the worst. She’d shoved her way past me as I tried to exit a subway car into a crowded station, when all New Yorkers knew that it was only polite to let the current passengers off first. We might not have had many small courtesies in this gray, hurried town, but this was one of them.

The woman shot me a look that somehow managed to say You were in MY way, pal and Who the hell do you think you are and I’ve already forgotten that this ever happened all in one glance. I pushed my way through the station and stalked up the stairs, with my bag, full of music and books and gym clothes, everything I’d need for the twelve or more hours I’d spend away from my apartment, digging into my shoulder. There were so many things about living in this city that I got so sick of—the noise, the constant whir of traffic and police sirens, the crowds, the pushy 40-something women in the subway.

I stepped out of the train at 57th Street to discover that the day, which had been cloudy when I’d headed underground, had turned sunny and brisk. Wind whipped around the corner, sweeping across Central Park and down Seventh Avenue, and I looked up to see Carnegie Hall, sand-colored, the size of a city block, looming ahead of me. This was one of the things that never ceased to amaze me: that I could be going about my day, picking up a prescription or racing from my day job to rehearsal, and happen to come across something like Carnegie Hall. Or Times Square. Or The Empire State Building. The monuments that other people had to spend their family vacations visiting were the fabric of the city I got to live in every day. And it was in these times, these few, fleeting moments of clarity, that I stepped back and looked at what I actually had: a boyfriend who loved me; an apartment in New York City; a fledgling opera career.

When I was growing up in rural Oklahoma, there weren’t many positive examples of homosexuality. The gay people in my hometown were closeted and often married. They limited their sexuality to anonymous encounters in park bathrooms or parked cars, then sat next to their wives in church the next morning, nodding along as the preacher called them an abomination, praying that the next time they wouldn’t be recognized as the high school guidance counselor or football coach. The acceptance of homosexuality back then in Oklahoma wasn’t a contentious issue, because it was never even considered. And as soon as I figured out I was gay, I knew that I had no choice but to get out.

This was what I sometimes had to stop myself to think about, whenever I got bogged down by the subway or by failed auditions. I’d gotten so busy hurtling through my life that I’d forgotten to take the time to appreciate the miracle that it had become. I’d made it somewhere that I could hold my boyfriend’s hand walking down the street and not worry about being catcalled or, worse, attacked. The life that I’d always dreamed was out there—the one where homosexuality wasn’t vilified as a crime against God, but was an ordinary, even boring trait—was the one I was living.

There were thousands of people who would’ve given their right arm to be standing where I was that day, outside Carnegie Hall, looking down Seventh Avenue toward Times Square. They were the people who were still fighting homophobia or self-hatred, isolated in places they’d never be able to be themselves. I had a lot to be thankful for, and I wasn’t going to forget it.

Open House

“So that’s it,” Paul said, giving me a playful kiss on the cheek. “I guess you’ve inadvertently moved into my place.” I set down my shopping bags—the official suitcase of the New York City Subway—which were full of all of the clothes and shoes that I could carry via public transit. Though it was unbelievable to most Americans, New York City was under siege by a nightmare straight from the middle ages, something that I only thought existed in nursery rhymes until I saw them with my own eyes: bedbugs. After multiple exterminations and nights spent itching (more from the thought of the little critters than from the critters themselves), I’d done what any sensible person would do. I’d chosen enough clothes to last me about a week—a few dress pants, all of the shoes I wore, some dress shirts, and some underwear and socks—put them in a bag, and took everything else to the laundromat. It would come back hermetically sealed in plastic bags, which would remain sealed until the exterminator told me that we didn’t have bedbugs anymore and that we didn’t need to worry about them coming back. The man who ran the laundromat I always went to, the man who offered his pack of Marlboro Lights and a few oranges to a statue of Buddha in the back, had handed me a receipt for washing 70 pounds of laundry and had said, very sincerely, “Thank you SO much!”

Of course, that meant that my two shopping bags with a week’s worth of clothes would have to go somewhere, since I refused to let bedbugs chase me out into a life on the street. And that somewhere, I had realized, was Paul’s apartment. I hadn’t slept at my apartment for months, but this, bringing all of the belongings that I’d need to live for the next few weeks, was different. It was no longer leaving an ever-expanding pile of dirty clothes in the corner of his living room, packing a bag each and every night as if I were going on the same overnight trip again and again.

“Where should I put all of this?” I asked. If there was one thing I wanted to avoid, it was invading Paul’s space too much. Paul wasn’t like me, in that he was neat. He put his clothes into the hamper when he was done wearing them; he used coasters under his drinks and swept his apartment once a week. Ensconcing myself, a messy whirlwind, in his tiny, immaculate New York City apartment seemed like the fastest way for him to get sick of dating me really quickly.

“It doesn’t really matter,” Paul responded. “Put your clothes wherever you want.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “With the amount I had to bring, I’ve kind of gone beyond being able to stuff it all into a corner.” I could just imagine what it’d look like, me trying to live out of the corner in Paul’s living room, the nook where his couch and his chair met with a diagonal side-table. I’d be running late in the morning, throwing clothes and shoes and underwear up and out of the pile, a geyser of laundry. For the next few weeks, at least, I was going to need a drawer.

“Okay,” Paul said, picking up one of my stuffed shopping bags and carrying it back to his bedroom, “I’ll make you some space in the closet.” With that, he started rearranging clothes in his already-full closet, doubling shirts up on hangers, putting in their place the few dress shirts I’d brought for the time I’d be exiled from my apartment.

It was a small act, really, but it made me love him just a little harder. Knowing that, in a time when I really needed him, he was there, with open arms and an open apartment.

Something of Our Own

“What are you guys doing for Thanksgiving? I certainly hope you’re planning on coming up to Connecticut again,” Barbara, my roommate’s mother, asked. Barbara was like my second mom, a woman who had taken me in and had happily included me in all of her family functions since mine was so far away. I’d spent the last few Thanksgivings at her place since I couldn’t afford to get home to Oklahoma. Even though her family had known me for years, I always met a new great-aunt or second cousin, and had to field the questions they lobbed at me (No, I don’t get to go home for Thanksgiving. Yes, Amanda and I met in college.). Still, it was definitely better than being completely without family.

“Sure,” I said, “if you’ll have us.”

It’s not that I didn’t always have a good time when I went to Amanda’s family’s house for holidays—this would be my third Thanksgiving with them—it’s just that it wasn’t the same as being with my own family. Even though Barbara and the rest of Amanda’s family welcomed me with open arms, it always felt like I was horning in on someone else’s celebration. They’d shown me nothing but love throughout the years, but I was certain that there was a great-uncle-in-law at the corner of every Thanksgiving table thinking, Who is that gay guy in the tie with the flowers all over it and why is he sitting here with our family? Luckily, no one in Amanda’s family suffered from dementia and they kept all of those thoughts, if they were having them, to themselves.

Of course, I was probably being paranoid. I’m sure that everyone there, all of Amanda’s extended family, knew that I didn’t have anywhere else to go, that they were the closest thing that I had to family on the East coast. But even if they wanted me there, it had raised a point in my own mind that I’d been avoiding: how long was I going to have to latch on to other peoples’ holidays? How long was it going to be until I’d have a place, a family of my own?

It wasn’t about wanting to cook a turkey or create my own family traditions, I realized; it was about yearning for the kind of permanence that I always felt like I was looking in at, from the outside. I’d been away from my own family for years, first at college, then at grad school. Now, finally, in New York City, thousands of miles away from the people who raised me and who I’d grown up with, I’d never stayed anywhere long enough to put down roots, to feel like I was somewhere that I belonged.

I decided that it was time to start my own Thanksgiving celebration, a dinner and a party where I’d gather all of the people who were in New York City without family nearby. It wouldn’t be the same as sitting at my grandmother’s table, so big that 15 of us could sit around it comfortably, going back for seconds or thirds of her homemade stuffing or mashed potatoes. As much as I hated to admit it, those days were over, and it was time for me to step out on my own. I’d celebrate Thanksgiving with the family that I’d chosen—my boyfriend and our closest friends—since I couldn’t be with the one that I’d been born into.

It was going to seem foreign at first, like we were kids playing at being grownups, imitating what we’d seen our parents and grandparents do. But everyone has to start somewhere. For something to become a tradition, it has to be born.

Around the World

When I met Brian, all long limbs hidden in baggy jeans and big, serious-looking brown eyes that betrayed the gravity he tried to conceal with his sly smile, he still had braces on his teeth. He was different from the other gay guys I’d met, since he cared more about self-examination and carefully chosen words than Cher or Madonna, and was more willing to listen to me and my dramatic proclamations than anyone I’d ever met.

I’d fallen for him hard, and had followed him to a basement party thrown by a bunch of upperclassmen who were known campus-wide for their debauched living. I walked down the rickety basement stairs, momentarily blinded by a flashing light the hosts had set up to coincide with the fog machine they’d found. I paused toward the middle of the stairs, attempting to find Brian while at the same time staying out of the way of the crowds of people walking around me. I was suddenly self-conscious about the outfit I’d chosen to wear, realizing that with my vintage bell-bottoms and tight Polo I’d tried way too hard to look good. On any of Brian’s friends the same outfit would’ve seemed hip, edgy. On me it seemed like drag, as if I’d put on a costume to try and blend in with his crowd. In a way, I guess, I had.

I went upstairs to the harshly-lit, smoky kitchen, where there were plastic cups and empty bottles piled around, and finally found Brian. Instead of what I’d hoped would happen—that he would somehow finally see what he was missing, that he’d take me by the arm and lead me to the back porch, where we’d have one of our self-consciously intimate conversations before finally making out—he motioned hello to me and lost his balance, falling heavily into one of his friends.

“Hey,” he said, squinting his eyes and scrunching his nose a little, “you came!”

“Yeah,” I said, trying not to be visibly disappointed. By the time I got to the party, having worked up enough courage to put on an outfit that I now felt ridiculous in, Brian was so drunk that he could barely stand up. This was what he did sometimes, for whatever reason: drank too much Jack Daniels too quickly for his skinny frame, as an escape from a mind that was always analyzing, always picking situations apart. It was always Jack Daniels, when it came to this, usually warm and neat. If you’d call swigs straight from a flask “warm” or “neat.” His mind, so discerning and self-deprecating, was my favorite thing about him; I could never understand why he’d drink himself out of it instead of just letting me in.

When I realized that Brian, who, after our short exchange, had been helped to a couch and had promptly passed out, wasn’t going to be seeing me any more that night, I made one more lap around the party, pretending that I was interested in what one of the hosts, a D.J., was playing: Daft Punk’s “Around the World.” I downed my drink, a warm mix of Kool-Aid and Kamchatka vodka, in one gulp and left, turning around once more to make sure that Brian was still passed out on the couch. He was.

When he found me the next day to apologize, he was obviously nursing a hangover. He spoke quietly, wincing with every word. “I’m sorry about last night. I got some bad news right before the party started and I kind of decided to drink through it.”

“That’s okay,” I said, pointedly not asking what the bad news was. He wouldn’t have told me, anyway. It was the dance we always did, the pouring out or withholding of information or affection, coming in stops and starts. No matter how much or how little he gave, though, I always found myself going back for more.

since i’ll be galavanting all over the midwest until friday at midnight, i’m going ahead and putting this week’s dirty laundry up. n-joy.

The Plunge

“Where do you want these?” I asked my friend Sean, referring to a box that had been labeled “miscellaneous,” which held, among other things, textbooks, a bowl full of change, matches from a dozen different restaurants, and one flip-flop. Presumably, the sandal’s mate had been packed away in some other box of miscellanea, not just left in Sean’s old apartment. I had seen with my own eyes that that apartment, the one in Hoboken he’d just vacated, was completely empty. Not only that, I’d seen that it was clean as a whistle, having indiscriminately cleaned out his old refrigerator while wearing yellow rubber dish washing gloves.

“Oh, anywhere is fine,” he said, gesturing to an empty corner of the living room. I set the box down and looked around at what we’d accomplished in half a day: filling up a Ryder truck in New Jersey and emptying its contents into a new apartment in Astoria, Queens. This, I thought, was really the easy part. The more difficult part was yet to come—emptying the boxes, tucking things away into closets and under the bed, finding a place for all of the stuff that one collects without really meaning to, all of the stuff that can’t be thrown away or parted with.

The apartment itself was beautiful, the kind of place that no one would ever find in Manhattan. That’s not quite true, I suppose. A comparable apartment could be had in the city, but no one I knew could ever afford it. The same apartment in the city—parquet floors, a brand-new bathroom and kitchen, big, wide windows in every room—would have cost three grand a month, and that was more than any of us made. My own apartment, in comparison, seemed a little more run-down, a little more lived-in. Maybe it was just the new coat of paint, but it really seemed like Sean and his boyfriend Cory had really moved up in the world.

And that wasn’t all they’d done. They’d taken the step that so many gay guys have taken before them: they had decided to co-habitate, finally moving in to a shared apartment after dating for three years and talking seriously about moving in together for at least the last nine months. On top of all of the understandable anxiety that accompanies such a move, there had been stops and starts, shady Realtors, and crooked landlords to contend with. They had finally done it, though, and I could see that they were excited.

Moving in together was no small commitment, they knew. Since they were New Yorkers instead of Bostonians, making the decision to move in together was the closest to getting married that they might ever come. Short of standing in a friend’s back yard in front of their family and friends, putting rings on each others’ fingers and announcing their undying love to all the world, this was the biggest commitment they could make to each other. So often, gay couples moved in with each other because it was convenient, or because they got caught up in the excitement of being in love, of having found someone with whom to share their lives. This wasn’t Cory and Sean’s situation, though. They were excited, of course, but they’d also signed a lease knowing exactly what they were getting themselves into.

As I opened the door to leave, I turned around to wave goodbye to Cory and Sean. They stood next to each other, arms hooked around each others’ waist. Cory wiped sweat from his brow with his forearm, then wiped it down the front of Sean’s shirt. Sean smiled and gave Cory a kiss on the cheek, and I shut the door behind me, leaving them to their new life.

I’d just made up some stupid, obvious lie about why I couldn’t keep the plans that I’d made with Matt—it wasn’t that I had to wash my hair, but it was equally transparent—and I could see the disappointment written across his face, the way his almost permanent smile dissolved, the rest of his features following his mouth’s downward trajectory. I’d always been a terrible liar; something was off in my presentation. I always included too many details or told the lie with too much gusto, too much enthusiasm, as if I thought that energetically pumping as much information as possible into it would help its credibility. I’m sure that Matt knew what I meant when I told him that I’d accidentally doubled-booked with another “friend.” It was a guy I was going on a date with—someone other than Matt, even though we’d been dating for three months.

“Oh,” he said, obviously crestfallen, “that’s fine. I have some stuff I need to do at home, anyway.” Matt knew that I was lying to him about who I was actually seeing, and it made me feel like a heel. One would think that I would’ve seen the error of my ways, that I realized I was treating Matt like I hated being treated. By doing this to him, assuming that I was free to date whoever I wanted until we had a monumental talk declaring our relationship official, I was playing the very game that I hated so much.

I knew that what I was doing to Matt wasn’t fair, that I wouldn’t want it done to me, but I did it anyway, which led me to a sad realization. If I was as into Matt as I was trying to pretend to be—if was as into him as he was me—I wouldn’t be doing any of this. I wouldn’t be cruising Friendster or MySpace, and I most certainly wouldn’t be going on actual dates with people I’d met there. I realized that no matter how much I wanted things with Matt to work, they just weren’t going to. I’d gotten myself into a situation I’d never been in before: needing to break up with someone because I had a date with someone else.

Whether or not my date with the new guy worked out, whether or not we’d see each other again, I had to end things with Matt.

“So, this isn’t really working,” I said to Matt over the phone. I held my breath, listening for his reaction. Was it possible that he felt the same way, that he was just waiting for me to make the first move?

“No, you’re right,” he said, sounding like he’d been expecting it. After you’ve had the guy you thought was your boyfriend tell you that he’s going on a date with someone else, nothing surprises you any more. “That guy that you hung out with last weekend,” he went on, “that wasn’t really just a friend, was it?”

“Was it that obvious?” I asked, disappointed in myself for how I was handling this whole situation, disappointed that I had this boy that I knew I should want—good looks, a good job, and the will to drag me out of my shell—but didn’t.

“Yeah,” he said, “it was. So I’ll see you later, okay?”

And just like that, it was over. Our conversation, our short-lived relationship. I’d learned what it felt like to be the one doing the dumping, and I’d found out that it didn’t feel any better.

Reproduction

Alyson gave Amanda and I a sideways look and asked our cocktail waitress what virgin drinks they had on the menu. Alyson wasn’t a drunk, but it was unlike her to abstain from drinking at a bar, especially when the girls we were with—girls who were visiting New York with Alyson and were on a mission to live Sex and the City—had already polished off their first $14 house martinis and were ordering more. Our bored waitress offered her a list of cocktails that could be made without alcohol, margaritas and mojitos that the bartender at this expensive hotel bar would apparently deign to pour. Alyson ordered a virgin mojito—a relative bargain at only $11—and the waitress, thin to the point of looking hungry, tottered off in her stilettos.

“This isn’t how I wanted to tell you this,” Alyson said, aware that Amanda and I were looking at her quizzically, “but Max and I are going to have a baby.” We stared at her for just a moment, slack-jawed at this piece of unexpected news, as Alyson went on. “We didn’t really plan it, and we hadn’t really expected to have kids for at least another few years, but we’ve thought about it and it just seems like the time is right. So, yeah. We’re having a baby.”

Amanda and I got over our initial shock and did what any friends would do: we caused a scene in the middle of the Hudson Hotel bar, showing its posh customers on their hip acrylic banquettes more genuine excitement than they’d probably seen in a long time. The reason we were so excited, not to mention so surprised, is that our group of friends aren’t really the type who have children.

There were always two camps, it seemed. There were those who lived out their lives following the expected trajectory, people who got married after college and then had children and moved to the suburbs, and those who didn’t, the ones who might want children someday but not more than they wanted to live well in the city. As a bunch of gay people and musicians, we belonged to the second group. We weren’t all single but none of us would be reproducing any time soon.

I knew that Alyson was right, though, that this really was the perfect time for she and her husband to have a child. They might’ve been a little younger than they planned, but they both had steady jobs at which they were rapidly advancing and they’d been married for two years. When I thought about all of the children born into much worse circumstances, it was hard to deny that they already had a one-up on the competition.

More importantly, I knew that they’d be great parents in a way that had nothing to do with having enough money or a roof over their heads. I knew that their child would be smart and worldly, a child who would be deeply loved but not sheltered or spoiled. Basically, Alyson and her husband were the kind of people I was happy to see reproduce, parents who would raise their child to respect everyone and the choices they made, regardless of how different they were. Why should home-schooling right-wing Christian Missourians be the only ones to contribute to the population?

“Well that’s just wonderful,” I told Alyson. “But how does that explain why you aren’t drinking?”