A Way With Words - Diary entry + Chapter 51
This chapter and the next one cover events first described in chapters 33 through 40.
DIARY ENTRY
January 15, 2013
I think I've fucked up.
Jack was trying to fix a glitch in my email program for me this morning. I could hear him muttering and sighing up in the bedroom. I stayed in the kitchen and tinkered with the toaster, trying to get the second slot working. To compensate for my ineptitude in the digital realm.
"Christ, don't you ever delete any emails? You've got nearly three thousand in your inbox. Your mail program is hogging half your RAM. Who's Jacquie Lawson, anyway? She sure sends you a lot of e-cards."
"They're not from her, they're by her," I yelled up to him. "Do me a favor and just click on the friggin’ link and then close the browser window. Otherwise the reminders that I haven't looked at them just keep coming."
I heard a few seconds of tinkling music. Then silence, then a different tune that abruptly stopped.
"I see what you mean."
I busied myself with a screwdriver and pliers; after a few minutes I had the elements glowing red again.
"I see you trust me so much you don't even clear your browser history."
"That's because I have nothing to hide!"
"So what's so fascinating about this flash mob video that you need to look at it ten times a day since Christmas, hmmm?"
Oh.
I went upstairs. When I was standing behind him I said, "Go ahead and watch it, then."
He clicked on the Play triangle in the middle of the screen. The good-looking Indian guy strolled into the crowd of shoppers and started his moves as the familiar music began. We watched it all the way through without comment, my anxious heart thudding in my throat. As dancers melted back into the crowds, Jack paused the video and moved the slider back to the beginning.
"You should've just left the YouTube page in a tab and done this every time you wanted to look at that guy," he said. "Then it wouldn't have registered as a new page view in the history."
"Okay." I hoped two flat syllables sounded more innocent than silence.
Jack turned in the chair and looked up at me. "Writing about him was bound to stir things up in you. It doesn't bother me."
I wish he'd sounded like he meant it.
June-August 1988
Jack's ostensible reason for calling me was to ask for bicycle repair advice. He may be able to fix a computer but he's always been clueless when it comes to anything without a screen or display panel. I recommended a bike shop in Harvard Square, and a week later he called me again. His bike was fixed, did I want to take a spin along Memorial Drive on Sunday? That’s the road that runs along the river on the Cambridge side, and during the summer the city still blocks it off from traffic on Sundays.
Just like for our meeting at Fenway Park, Jack went overboard getting his attire just right. To this day the memory of him coasting up to me in black spandex cycling shorts and a yellow jersey cracks me up. I never remind him of it, though. I was wearing pretty much the same clothes as the day at Fenway, minus the leather jacket, and I didn't even have a helmet. And when he told me what the problem had been with his bicycle, he could tell I was straining not to roll my eyes. [Actually, I'm sure I was struggling to keep my gaze from straying to your skin-tight shorts, Jack.]
In a long bike race like the Tour de France, the racer with the best overall time wears the yellow jersey. It's possible to earn and keep it without ever winning a stage. When I review the summer of 1988 I don't look down on a peloton of racers cooperating to reach the same destination - I see a handful of struggling individuals lost in their own troubles. We are strung out along the road - me, Kaj, Jay, Jack, Lureen, Jamie, Jacques. Now I know all our private stories. I understand why Jay is falling away from my side; there is Jacques creeping up from the rear, cruising up next to her. I see Lureen, who has been riding in Jack's slipstream, slowing down and letting Jamie come close. He encourages her, and Jay comes alongside as well, while Jacques is relaxing, letting Jay do the hard work in front of him. Jack is oblivious - he doesn't know that he's no longer supporting Lureen. He's looking ahead at me, not sure whether we should be a team, now charging up close to me, dancing on the pedals, now dropping back. I'm peering far ahead at Kaj, who ignores everyone but me. He maintains the pace, glancing over his shoulder at me, hoping I will catch up with him. Kaj is wearing the yellow jersey, but Jack wants it.
Jack and I wheeled along the road as far as the BU Bridge and then back up the Boston side on the bike path. I don't remember what we talked about once we could ride side by side. Nothing significant. It was when we sat down on a bench to rest that Jack really opened up. That was the first time I heard about him getting beaten up while he was in college.
When Junior and Jenny were both at home this past Christmas they overheard us talking about it. I'd asked him about certain details, not realizing they were in the other room. The next moment, they were both in the kitchen doorway, shock on their faces.
"You were gay-bashed, Jack?" Junior exclaimed.
"Yeah, but it wasn't called that back then," Jack said. "I was just mugged."
"Just," I repeated.
"I came out of a gay bar at 3 am and four guys followed me in a car. After two blocks they got out and jumped me. Knocked me down, kicked and stomped me, called me a faggot. At least they took my wallet, and I could tell the police it was a robbery. But one of the kicks to my head knocked me out. I was lucky: a girl from my college happened to drive by a few minutes later."
Jack glanced at me. We've never told the twins the truth about Lureen. They assume the dark-haired woman who helped raise them until they were four was their mother. I was planning to show this memoir to them when I'm done writing, but now I'm not so sure.
That day by the river, Jack referred to her as Laura. She and the friend she'd been driving home spotted him bleeding on the sidewalk and summoned help. Beginning with the day that Lureen came to see him in the hospital, Jack's life slipped onto a track that he hadn't imagined was really accessible to him.
"I finally found a woman I connected with," is the way he put it to me. He jumped to his feet as he spoke the words, and gripped the handlebars of his fancy bike. Had that ever happened to me?
I didn't register his agitation, for I'd just realized something. Jay had been the engine of our coupling - it hadn't been an equal effort at all. No, that wasn't entirely true. I'd held onto her and tried to keep up.
"Yeah, I did connect with Jay," I said aloud.
Jack said, "People tell you that you just haven't met the right woman when-"
A pair of bicycle bells ching-chinged loudly. Two little girls, maybe eight and ten years old, came flying along the path on three-speeds and must have thought that Jack was about to mount his bike in front of them. He says the bells jerked him back to reality: he was with a straight guy to whom he didn't want to come out.
The girls whizzed past us, backs straight in the saddles, honey brown hair flying loose over their shoulders, matching striped gypsy-style skirts fluttering out from their legs. Their little, perfect calves flexed above their pink and yellow flip-flops. I understand now that those skirts were special - gifts from grandparents, or found on sale for them - and that they'd insisted on wearing them for that family outing, no matter how impractical. (I remember the intent expressions of their parents who rode behind in their sensible shorts and sneakers, the way they fixed their gaze on the rear wheels of the child bikes where the skirt hems tickled the spokes.) I sat and Jack stood frozen, both of us staring at their backs as the family receded, disappearing into the distance along with the moment when another few words might have changed our lives right away instead of later.
Not long after that day, Jay and I watched the Fourth of July fireworks over the Charles River. In the middle of the explosions I saw Lureen and a man I thought was Jack walking through the crowd. They sat down a few yards away from us, his arm around her, and that's when I realized she was with Jamie Randall, the color separation house salesman. A few weeks later, as I was leaving East West through the back entrance, I caught them in a clinch in the alley. They didn't see me, and I ducked back through the door, trying to process what I'd witnessed. Their embrace was one of passionate lovers, but Lureen looked on the verge of tears.
I itched with curiosity about Lureen's relationship with Jack. He never hinted that they were no longer together. Why was she secretly with a guy who looked so much like him? It was a relief to me to wonder about those two so that I couldn't think every minute of the day about Kaj, who had gone but was still very much present in my life, through postcards and phone calls. He missed me, and I struggled against my yearning to visit him in Toronto. At one point I actually thought that Jay and I could take a vacation in Ontario and that meeting Kaj with her in tow would douse the fire.
Time might have naturally, gradually done that. But Jay's boss surprised her with the gift of a great block of the calendar stuffed with constant activity away from Boston: she was to travel with the Dukakis campaign between the end of the conventions in late August and Election Day in early November. After she'd unpacked the news and waved it in my face in our kitchen - throwing her arms around me as if I deserved the thanks for this wonderful opportunity - all I could do was stare into space, imagining the rows of empty squares in September and October and trying not to think of them as all mine, to fill as I pleased.
I called Jack one day in August and invited him to come with me to Franklin Park the following Sunday to watch a cricket match. I told myself it was an opportunity to find more out about the mysterious Lureen Newsome.
Now Jack was convinced of my straightness, since I couldn't seem to think of anything to do with him that didn't involve a sport. I played a joke on him, though, by telling him that even spectators had to dress all in white. He was sure I was bullshitting him [though I distinctly remember you apologizing for turning up in khaki pants, Jack], because he'd seen the film Maurice the previous year and the wealthy people watching that pivotal cricket scene had not been clad in white. He’d gone to see the film several times. As soon as the word "cricket" was out of my mouth, Jack remembered Alec Scudder and Maurice Hall exchanging happy smiles and longing looks on the pitch - and of course the scene that preceded it. For several nights leading up to that Sunday, Jack the experienced one climbed up the ladder and through that window in his dreams - to find me in that big white bed, to take me in his arms and tell me it was alright, that he knew.
But I was straight, so he forced that fantasy aside. And yet, the day we met at the Orange Line station to ride out to Franklin Park, I startled Jack by asking him if "the beard was gone for good." He'd arrived nearly clean-shaven for once. I was unfamiliar with that awful term for a girlfriend that a closeted man acquires to allay suspicion, but Jack didn't know that. He wondered about me. He mentioned Lilac Sunday at the Arboretum, and remarked on my being a catcher rather than a pitcher in high school. When he talked about his parents' deceptions to keep the dude ranch guests convinced they were getting an authentic experience, he said, "You have to do what you need to do, say what you need to say, to survive." Later Jack would claim he'd been waving a lavender flag at me that day, to see if I'd react. But talk about subtle! It was a sign of how closed off and paranoid Jack was that he thought talk of purple and beards and catchers could out a guy.
Anyway, I was a million miles away, remembering the day I'd watched Kaj play in this field earlier in the spring. At one point a Tamil whom Jack's law firm had represented, and who'd been in the detention center with Kaj, left the field and came over to greet us. Jack was glad to see Ravi, gratified too by the man's good spirits and the knowledge that he'd had something to do with that. It was the first time I'd seen genuine happiness behind Jack's smile. Poor Jack; even the sight of him smiling reminded me of Kaj. I think it was that moment that I knew I couldn't deny what I was. Ironically, Jack went home convinced that I could only be a friend to him.
I bought a plane ticket to Toronto for Labor Day weekend. I intended to come out to Jay before I left, but I put it off too long. She was summoned to the campaign early; I came home to tell her and found her packing her bag, a taxi waiting outside.
To see the cricket scene from Maurice (and the scene before it), go HERE (the whole film is on this YT account).
Chapter 52 >>
DIARY ENTRY
January 15, 2013
I think I've fucked up.
Jack was trying to fix a glitch in my email program for me this morning. I could hear him muttering and sighing up in the bedroom. I stayed in the kitchen and tinkered with the toaster, trying to get the second slot working. To compensate for my ineptitude in the digital realm.
"Christ, don't you ever delete any emails? You've got nearly three thousand in your inbox. Your mail program is hogging half your RAM. Who's Jacquie Lawson, anyway? She sure sends you a lot of e-cards."
"They're not from her, they're by her," I yelled up to him. "Do me a favor and just click on the friggin’ link and then close the browser window. Otherwise the reminders that I haven't looked at them just keep coming."
I heard a few seconds of tinkling music. Then silence, then a different tune that abruptly stopped.
"I see what you mean."
I busied myself with a screwdriver and pliers; after a few minutes I had the elements glowing red again.
"I see you trust me so much you don't even clear your browser history."
"That's because I have nothing to hide!"
"So what's so fascinating about this flash mob video that you need to look at it ten times a day since Christmas, hmmm?"
Oh.
I went upstairs. When I was standing behind him I said, "Go ahead and watch it, then."
He clicked on the Play triangle in the middle of the screen. The good-looking Indian guy strolled into the crowd of shoppers and started his moves as the familiar music began. We watched it all the way through without comment, my anxious heart thudding in my throat. As dancers melted back into the crowds, Jack paused the video and moved the slider back to the beginning.
"You should've just left the YouTube page in a tab and done this every time you wanted to look at that guy," he said. "Then it wouldn't have registered as a new page view in the history."
"Okay." I hoped two flat syllables sounded more innocent than silence.
Jack turned in the chair and looked up at me. "Writing about him was bound to stir things up in you. It doesn't bother me."
I wish he'd sounded like he meant it.
June-August 1988
Jack's ostensible reason for calling me was to ask for bicycle repair advice. He may be able to fix a computer but he's always been clueless when it comes to anything without a screen or display panel. I recommended a bike shop in Harvard Square, and a week later he called me again. His bike was fixed, did I want to take a spin along Memorial Drive on Sunday? That’s the road that runs along the river on the Cambridge side, and during the summer the city still blocks it off from traffic on Sundays.
Just like for our meeting at Fenway Park, Jack went overboard getting his attire just right. To this day the memory of him coasting up to me in black spandex cycling shorts and a yellow jersey cracks me up. I never remind him of it, though. I was wearing pretty much the same clothes as the day at Fenway, minus the leather jacket, and I didn't even have a helmet. And when he told me what the problem had been with his bicycle, he could tell I was straining not to roll my eyes. [Actually, I'm sure I was struggling to keep my gaze from straying to your skin-tight shorts, Jack.]
In a long bike race like the Tour de France, the racer with the best overall time wears the yellow jersey. It's possible to earn and keep it without ever winning a stage. When I review the summer of 1988 I don't look down on a peloton of racers cooperating to reach the same destination - I see a handful of struggling individuals lost in their own troubles. We are strung out along the road - me, Kaj, Jay, Jack, Lureen, Jamie, Jacques. Now I know all our private stories. I understand why Jay is falling away from my side; there is Jacques creeping up from the rear, cruising up next to her. I see Lureen, who has been riding in Jack's slipstream, slowing down and letting Jamie come close. He encourages her, and Jay comes alongside as well, while Jacques is relaxing, letting Jay do the hard work in front of him. Jack is oblivious - he doesn't know that he's no longer supporting Lureen. He's looking ahead at me, not sure whether we should be a team, now charging up close to me, dancing on the pedals, now dropping back. I'm peering far ahead at Kaj, who ignores everyone but me. He maintains the pace, glancing over his shoulder at me, hoping I will catch up with him. Kaj is wearing the yellow jersey, but Jack wants it.
Jack and I wheeled along the road as far as the BU Bridge and then back up the Boston side on the bike path. I don't remember what we talked about once we could ride side by side. Nothing significant. It was when we sat down on a bench to rest that Jack really opened up. That was the first time I heard about him getting beaten up while he was in college.
When Junior and Jenny were both at home this past Christmas they overheard us talking about it. I'd asked him about certain details, not realizing they were in the other room. The next moment, they were both in the kitchen doorway, shock on their faces.
"You were gay-bashed, Jack?" Junior exclaimed.
"Yeah, but it wasn't called that back then," Jack said. "I was just mugged."
"Just," I repeated.
"I came out of a gay bar at 3 am and four guys followed me in a car. After two blocks they got out and jumped me. Knocked me down, kicked and stomped me, called me a faggot. At least they took my wallet, and I could tell the police it was a robbery. But one of the kicks to my head knocked me out. I was lucky: a girl from my college happened to drive by a few minutes later."
Jack glanced at me. We've never told the twins the truth about Lureen. They assume the dark-haired woman who helped raise them until they were four was their mother. I was planning to show this memoir to them when I'm done writing, but now I'm not so sure.
That day by the river, Jack referred to her as Laura. She and the friend she'd been driving home spotted him bleeding on the sidewalk and summoned help. Beginning with the day that Lureen came to see him in the hospital, Jack's life slipped onto a track that he hadn't imagined was really accessible to him.
"I finally found a woman I connected with," is the way he put it to me. He jumped to his feet as he spoke the words, and gripped the handlebars of his fancy bike. Had that ever happened to me?
I didn't register his agitation, for I'd just realized something. Jay had been the engine of our coupling - it hadn't been an equal effort at all. No, that wasn't entirely true. I'd held onto her and tried to keep up.
"Yeah, I did connect with Jay," I said aloud.
Jack said, "People tell you that you just haven't met the right woman when-"
A pair of bicycle bells ching-chinged loudly. Two little girls, maybe eight and ten years old, came flying along the path on three-speeds and must have thought that Jack was about to mount his bike in front of them. He says the bells jerked him back to reality: he was with a straight guy to whom he didn't want to come out.
The girls whizzed past us, backs straight in the saddles, honey brown hair flying loose over their shoulders, matching striped gypsy-style skirts fluttering out from their legs. Their little, perfect calves flexed above their pink and yellow flip-flops. I understand now that those skirts were special - gifts from grandparents, or found on sale for them - and that they'd insisted on wearing them for that family outing, no matter how impractical. (I remember the intent expressions of their parents who rode behind in their sensible shorts and sneakers, the way they fixed their gaze on the rear wheels of the child bikes where the skirt hems tickled the spokes.) I sat and Jack stood frozen, both of us staring at their backs as the family receded, disappearing into the distance along with the moment when another few words might have changed our lives right away instead of later.
Not long after that day, Jay and I watched the Fourth of July fireworks over the Charles River. In the middle of the explosions I saw Lureen and a man I thought was Jack walking through the crowd. They sat down a few yards away from us, his arm around her, and that's when I realized she was with Jamie Randall, the color separation house salesman. A few weeks later, as I was leaving East West through the back entrance, I caught them in a clinch in the alley. They didn't see me, and I ducked back through the door, trying to process what I'd witnessed. Their embrace was one of passionate lovers, but Lureen looked on the verge of tears.
I itched with curiosity about Lureen's relationship with Jack. He never hinted that they were no longer together. Why was she secretly with a guy who looked so much like him? It was a relief to me to wonder about those two so that I couldn't think every minute of the day about Kaj, who had gone but was still very much present in my life, through postcards and phone calls. He missed me, and I struggled against my yearning to visit him in Toronto. At one point I actually thought that Jay and I could take a vacation in Ontario and that meeting Kaj with her in tow would douse the fire.
Time might have naturally, gradually done that. But Jay's boss surprised her with the gift of a great block of the calendar stuffed with constant activity away from Boston: she was to travel with the Dukakis campaign between the end of the conventions in late August and Election Day in early November. After she'd unpacked the news and waved it in my face in our kitchen - throwing her arms around me as if I deserved the thanks for this wonderful opportunity - all I could do was stare into space, imagining the rows of empty squares in September and October and trying not to think of them as all mine, to fill as I pleased.
I called Jack one day in August and invited him to come with me to Franklin Park the following Sunday to watch a cricket match. I told myself it was an opportunity to find more out about the mysterious Lureen Newsome.
Now Jack was convinced of my straightness, since I couldn't seem to think of anything to do with him that didn't involve a sport. I played a joke on him, though, by telling him that even spectators had to dress all in white. He was sure I was bullshitting him [though I distinctly remember you apologizing for turning up in khaki pants, Jack], because he'd seen the film Maurice the previous year and the wealthy people watching that pivotal cricket scene had not been clad in white. He’d gone to see the film several times. As soon as the word "cricket" was out of my mouth, Jack remembered Alec Scudder and Maurice Hall exchanging happy smiles and longing looks on the pitch - and of course the scene that preceded it. For several nights leading up to that Sunday, Jack the experienced one climbed up the ladder and through that window in his dreams - to find me in that big white bed, to take me in his arms and tell me it was alright, that he knew.
But I was straight, so he forced that fantasy aside. And yet, the day we met at the Orange Line station to ride out to Franklin Park, I startled Jack by asking him if "the beard was gone for good." He'd arrived nearly clean-shaven for once. I was unfamiliar with that awful term for a girlfriend that a closeted man acquires to allay suspicion, but Jack didn't know that. He wondered about me. He mentioned Lilac Sunday at the Arboretum, and remarked on my being a catcher rather than a pitcher in high school. When he talked about his parents' deceptions to keep the dude ranch guests convinced they were getting an authentic experience, he said, "You have to do what you need to do, say what you need to say, to survive." Later Jack would claim he'd been waving a lavender flag at me that day, to see if I'd react. But talk about subtle! It was a sign of how closed off and paranoid Jack was that he thought talk of purple and beards and catchers could out a guy.
Anyway, I was a million miles away, remembering the day I'd watched Kaj play in this field earlier in the spring. At one point a Tamil whom Jack's law firm had represented, and who'd been in the detention center with Kaj, left the field and came over to greet us. Jack was glad to see Ravi, gratified too by the man's good spirits and the knowledge that he'd had something to do with that. It was the first time I'd seen genuine happiness behind Jack's smile. Poor Jack; even the sight of him smiling reminded me of Kaj. I think it was that moment that I knew I couldn't deny what I was. Ironically, Jack went home convinced that I could only be a friend to him.
I bought a plane ticket to Toronto for Labor Day weekend. I intended to come out to Jay before I left, but I put it off too long. She was summoned to the campaign early; I came home to tell her and found her packing her bag, a taxi waiting outside.
To see the cricket scene from Maurice (and the scene before it), go HERE (the whole film is on this YT account).
Chapter 52 >>