Blink (11 page)

But he didn’t really deny or confirm when I said I thought I was meeting Carlos. If he were Carlos, wouldn’t he have just said so?

He comes back to the table and sits down. He empties a couple of packets of Splenda into the steaming coffee and stirs, looking over at me, a little grin on his face. It doesn’t look mischievous, just sad, sort of sympathetic.

A light bulb flashes on above my head, metaphorically, and just as metaphorically, I pull the little chain to switch it off.
No
.

“I’m not Carlos.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“My name’s Evan. Evan Hyatt.”

I nod. “Andy Slater.”

We fall to silence, me sipping tea gone cold and him concentrating on what Carly Simon might call the clouds in his coffee.

Evan speaks first. “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.” He smiles. “And I’m going to tell you, but first I just wondered if you wouldn’t mind telling
me
what prompted you to contact Carlos. Your message mentioned the 80s, so I get the impression you haven’t seen him in a long time.”

I feel a little panicked. This most likely is Carlos’s lover, partner, boyfriend, husband, whatever term they used. I decide just to keep it brief and noncommittal. There’s no reason this guy needs to know the almost subconscious crush I’ve harbored for his man over the last three decades. I would look like a nut.

And maybe I am.

I simply say, shrugging, “You know how you get bored at work and you start trying to find people online you once knew?”

Evan shook his head. “I’m a physician’s assistant. I don’t get much time to play around on the Internet. Carlos was more interested in it than I am.”

I notice the past tense. My stomach begins to churn. “Anyway, that’s all. We used to be friends, and I just entered his name on Facebook and thought I’d see if we couldn’t catch up.” The nausea increases. Desperately, I ask, “Why are you here?” Even though I’m pretty sure I already know the reason, I hold out hope that it’s something else.

There’s a long silence. What I might call a “pregnant pause.”

Evan closes his eyes for a second and then opens them to focus his gaze on me. He licks his lips. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but Carlos passed away a year ago. He was in a bad car accident on Lake Shore Drive.” Tears spring to his eyes, and one rolls down his cheek. Embarrassed, he smiles and wipes it away with the back of his hand. “Sorry.” He gives a little laugh. “I’m still a little raw.”

The news stuns me, and I’m at a loss for words. This wasn’t the outcome I was expecting at all.

Evan says, “I hope you’re okay. It doesn’t sound like you guys were
too
close, if you hadn’t seen him in all these years. But I thought it was the right thing to do to tell you in person.”

“Thank you.”

Evan is visibly shaken, and I wonder if he’s about to burst into sobs. He stands suddenly. “I guess there’s not much more to say. I hope my news didn’t come as too big of a shock.”

I know I’ll have questions, but my mind is too stunned at that moment to formulate any. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I say, a little breathless.

We stare at one another, two strangers in a crowded café.

“I should be going.”

“Thank you for going to the trouble. You’re a nice man; you could have just written me back.”

“I didn’t know what your relationship to Carlos was from your note. I thought it was the right thing to do.”

I nod.

“Well, good-bye.”

I stand up to watch Evan walk away.

I plop back down in my chair after he’s out of sight, feeling numb, as if the nerve endings in my extremities have been deadened somehow. I try to swallow, but there’s no spit. When I take a sip of my cold tea, I notice my hand is trembling.
You did think he might be dead. That was one of the possibilities. But hearing it now suddenly makes it seem too real, too sad. I’ll never have the chance to tell him how much he meant to me
.

I sit and simply stare out the grimy window, watching the quality of light morph as the sun gets closer to setting. Shadows deepen in the room. Ironically, my ears perk up and tune in on the song playing in the background. It’s from that time when Carlos and I first met. The band is Quarterflash. I remember because I had the vinyl album and used to play it on the stereo set that was my pride and joy when I was in my twenties, but now seems overly large and cumbersome. The song playing is “Harden My Heart.” It’s all about swallowing one’s tears and getting over a lost love.

The one thing Evan said eats at me, makes me feel like a fool. “It doesn’t sound like you guys were
too
close, if you hadn’t seen him in all these years.”

The bald truth of that makes me wonder about myself. What’s so lacking in my life that I was hungry for a connection with a man I knew only briefly thirty years ago?

What’s the definition of pathetic?

I’
VE
NEVER
been able to shake the bonds of Catholicism. I say that like it’s some naughty admission, like I’ve never been able to quit smoking. But it’s true, even though the Church’s policies have infuriated me and made me feel unwelcome as a gay man, its roots run deep into my soul. It’s hard to break a habit that started with your baptism, continued through weekly catechism
and
parochial school and confirmation at age twelve. When I entered the seminary, I really believed I’d spend my life in the priesthood, doing good works, shepherding my flock, wherever they ended up being.

The Church’s rich traditions and ceremony will always be a part of me. There’s no escaping, even though my logical mind tells me over and over I’m dwelling in a house that sees me as unfit, or worse, unclean. That same voice says I should find an “open and affirming” denomination—the Congregational Church or the Unitarians, maybe—if I need organized religion in my life.

But that voice can’t compete with the deeper one inside or the little boy who daydreamed of himself in priest’s robes at mass, swinging the incense-filled censer.

I gave up a long time ago. I’m a Catholic and always will be. I tell myself sometimes that the Church is made up of men who will eventually see the error of their ways when it comes to gay people. Now I think I will be long gone before that day of reckoning, but it doesn’t stop me from hoping. I bear in mind that, as a gay man, I am made, just like everyone else, in God’s image.

It’s this last that allows me to cling to the Church, because it belongs ultimately to God, not man. And I know he doesn’t see me as evil or wicked or wrong. I’m one of his children.

So I come to confession every week. Things have changed a lot about this rite since I was a boy. Gone are the dark, closet-like rooms with the mesh window at which you would kneel and say, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been (insert time) since my last confession.” Then you’d launch into your sins. And you’d better know precisely how many times you lied, cursed, coveted, or whatever, because the priest would want to know exact numbers. I smile with the memory of my first confession and fighting with the priest, because how was a six-year-old supposed to remember how many times he had fibbed over the course of his life? That priest, Father Sgro I think his name was, kept pressing me for a number. I kept pushing back that I didn’t know. I was only being honest.

“Don’t argue with the priest!” he thundered through the partition.

“Nine times,” I said meekly, suitably admonished.

Now I just meet the priest at the parish housing for St. Christina. We sit in the living room, and Father Gomez serves me tea in a bone china set he picked up on a trip to the Midlands of England. He’s a nice guy, about the same age as I am, Cuban too. He says one Sunday service in Spanish. He once regaled me with how he floated to the US on an inner tube and washed up on a Miami Beach shoreline. He had been twelve years old.

We sip our tea, and he eyes me over the top of his reading glasses. He’s bald and has a rim of still-black hair that encircles his head. I like to believe that, even though we’re roughly the same age, he looks a lot older than I do. Today he’s dressed in tan slacks, black shirt, and wears his clerical collar. He blows on his Darjeeling and waits for me to begin.

I still say it. It’s a line of demarcation between everyday conversation about the weather, Cubs scores, or how work is going.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

Father Gomez, Julio, sets his cup down on the rosewood table at his side. The living room of the parish house is fussy, looking as though grandmothers with an addiction to French provincial decorated it. He leans forward.

I chuckle. “This week isn’t going to be any different from the rest, Julio. No juicy stuff. I didn’t go to the bathhouse, have a one-night stand, or murder anybody. No, just the usual litany of half-truths, taking the Lord’s name in vain, and coveting my neighbor’s husband. But honestly, if you could see him, you’d understand why. I beat off one time thinking about him.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s the best I can do, Father.”

He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. A wry grin flits about his lips. “You’re pathetic.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I think three Hail Marys and an Our Father should about cover it.”

I nod. “You want me to say it?”

“Up to you. We’re relaxed at confession now, you know.”

“I have to. Wouldn’t seem right.”

“Knock yourself out.”

I recite the words that have been stamped on my brain since I was six. “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you, and I detest all my sins, because of your just punishments, but most of all because they offend you, my God, who are all-good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of your grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin.”

Julio nods and sits back in his chair, taking up his tea once again. “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, you want to tell me what’s really bothering you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t hide it from me. Something’s eating away at that pretty face.”

“Father,” I admonish, trying to change the subject.

“Come on. Out with it.”

I know what he’s talking about—this cloud of sadness that’s enveloped me ever since Harry passed away. People tell me that you never get over losing someone you love, but that it gets better. That it becomes a scar and you always know it’s there, but you move on.

But when?

“It’s Harry.”

Julio nods.

The emotions rush up—the lump in my throat, that peculiar burning sensation in the eyes that signals tears. I try to stuff everything down inside. I don’t want to blubber into my tea. I’ve done that enough. “I just can’t seem to get on with things, you know? I smile, I laugh, I go to work, but nothing’s the same.”

Julio nods. “And it probably won’t ever be. You had an idea of what the future would be, and now you’re staring down the barrel of a future you never imagined.”

“Exactly. Even when we first met, and I told him he was HIV positive, even then I didn’t think he’d die from it. And he didn’t. What I never expected was that I would lose him to something else.”

“Cancer’s a terrible thing.”

“So now I just—I don’t know—feel so empty, so lost. It’s like I have no direction anymore.”

“You have a job, don’t you? A good one, even if doesn’t pay a lot, one where you actually do some good in the world, help folks. You have friends, don’t you? Your mama’s still kickin’, and that’s more than a lot our age can say. When’s the last time you called her?”

“Ah, don’t make me feel guilty. I’ll call her on Sunday.” I take a deep breath. “All of what you said is true. And I’m grateful.”

“It’s always better to be thankful for what you have, rather than mourn what you don’t. Cornball maybe, but I think that’s the key to anyone’s happiness.”

“You’re right. You’re right.” I want to argue with him. Tell him how alone I feel every night when I come home to the little condo Harry and I bought together. The peculiarly lonely sound my keys make when I set them on the metal tray on the table by the door. The silence rushing in, where once Harry would have music playing,
anything from Led Zeppelin and “Stairway to Heaven” to Rosemary Clooney singing “Come On-A My House.” The place, still cleaned every other week by a woman named Paulina, is pristine. I miss the smells of Harry’s cooking. It didn’t matter what it was—a roast in the oven, beans in the slow cooker, maybe just onions and garlic in a fry pan. It made me happy when I walked in the door. Those things made it home.

Now it’s just a house.

But if I tell the father that, he’s just going to say I’m feeling sorry for myself—and I am—and that I should take a different attitude. Embrace the silence. Cherish my memories. Harry lives on. He’ll always be with me.

I know all the answers, but I can’t seem to take them to heart. I can’t seem to make myself believe.

I drain my teacup and set it down. I stand. “Thanks for being there, Father. I appreciate it.”

“You remember what I said.”

“I will.”

“And one other thing.” The priest scratches at his neck and gives me a grin that can only be described as wicked. “And I know as a priest this is a horrible thing for me to say, but I’m gonna say it anyway.”

I cock my head.

“Go out and get laid.” He gestures with a pointing finger up and down my body. “That shouldn’t be going to waste.”

I chuckle. “I’ll take that under advisement.”

“You do that.” He winks. “The Lord won’t mind.”

“You’re terrible. You should be defrocked.”

“I should be so lucky. Now go on, get out of here.”

“See you next week.”

Julio nods and gives a little wave.

I
STILL
feel a little shaken after I get home from my meeting with Evan. Even though the possibility of Carlos being dead had crossed my mind, I still feel stunned by it.