Love & Lies: Marisol's Story (7 page)

I smiled. “You mean tell you how a
perfect
day is spent by a local brat in Harvard Square? Well, I worked as a waitress in a greasy spoon from six to midnight, and got yelled at by my boss for no reason at all—”

“Which didn’t actually bother you that much.”

“True.”

“What else? What did you do this morning?”

“Oh, I went to a class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education—a class on writing a novel.”

Her eyes opened wide. “Really? You’re writing a novel?”

“I’m trying to. That’s why I didn’t go right to college this year. The teacher is this unbelievable woman named Olivia Frost. She’s brilliant. She went to Harvard.”

She shrugged. “Not so impressed by Harvard; my sister went there, you know.”

“Well, sister, schmister, I’m telling you—Olivia is brilliant. Listening to her talk is mesmerizing. I spent the afternoon working on the writing exercise for next week, and then I started working on the actual novel. She’s got me really psyched about it.”

Lee shook her head and laughed. “Your life
is
perfect, Marisol. Do you even realize that?”

“Oh, shut up and give me a piece of gum already.”

Maybe I wanted Lee to think my life was perfect, that no improvements were necessary. If she thought it was true, maybe I would too. Until I went home by myself and realized that, like my alter ego, Christina, I was still missing one thing.

I
DID SOME MORE WORK
on the character of Christina during the next few days; I figured out her background, her age, and where she lived, all of which seemed to be embarrassingly similar to my own statistics. But I knew that first novels were often that way, especially when the author was young. Hey, I hadn’t had that much life experience yet—I had to write about what I knew, didn’t I? I changed a few things: She lived in Boston instead of Cambridge, and she worked as a receptionist for a dentist because I thought I could get a few tooth jokes out of that. But Christina was an eighteen-year-old lesbian, and she lived with her gay best friend, and her mother was the president of the local PFLAG chapter (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), because those are some of the things that make me the way I am, and I wanted to be able to use them in the novel.

Since Christina’s parents were less wealthy than my own, she was attending college part-time and working for the dentist part-time. She was smart and cocky and a little bit of a wiseass. And of course her fatal flaw was her desperate wish to be loved. This was going to get her into trouble down the line, although I wasn’t sure yet just how that would happen.

I was stumped about who she would fall in love with. No one as unrealistic as Olivia, I told myself, because things like that just didn’t happen.

When the writing stalled, I daydreamed about Olivia. I couldn’t help it. She was parked right there in my unconscious, just waiting to materialize in all her long-legged beauty. One night I got out the phone book and looked up
FROST, OLIVIA
, and there she was! She lived in Somerville too, but on the other end of town from me. I wrote her phone number and address on a piece of paper and stared at it as though there were secrets to be divined from the letters and numbers. Thank goodness neither Birdie nor I had a car, or I would have driven over there and parked outside her house for the chance to see her come and go. I knew that rational people called this stalking, but I was beginning to realize that when it came to Olivia, I was not particularly rational.

It was just as well that I had plans for Wednesday night. Mom had said to come for dinner and to bring Birdie, and Birdie had called her back to see if it would be okay to bring Damon along as well. Of course Mom said yes, unaware that Damon was a big termite eating away at the foundation of my long friendship with Birdie.

Yes, I am opinionated. Yes, there are people who would say I’m difficult to get along with. And yes, I did take a rather immediate and perhaps irrational dislike to Damon on first meeting. But once it became clear that this person was really moving into my space whether I liked it or not, I made an effort. I spent Saturday night watching season-one
Will and Grace
DVDs with both of them and didn’t even make any cracks about how
in reality nobody would be able to stand living with either Will
or
Grace because they both whined too damn much.

On Sunday morning I made blueberry pancakes, not realizing, of course, that Damon didn’t eat blueberries because “the texture is just . . .”—and here he made a gagging noise. Thank you very much. So I made an entirely new batch
without
blueberries, and Birdie wanted to know if I didn’t think they were “a little gluey.” I did not say, “The better to paste both your mouths shut.”

When Damon complained to Birdie that my music had awakened him from a Sunday afternoon nap, and Birdie complained to me about it, and then Damon begged me to forget all about it, really, it was no big deal, and Birdie gave him a big wet smack on the cheek and me a look of disappointment—after all this I did not scream in their faces about the night they’d kept me awake yakking and playing seventies disco music in the living room!

I was being a goddamn saint about all this because Birdie had been my best friend, my main confidante, since I was ten years old. He didn’t always get me, and I didn’t always get him, but we didn’t judge each other for our idiosyncrasies either. We’d nursed each other through a couple of rocky romances, and he could always make me laugh. Until now. Now he apparently made Damon laugh, but the humor of the situation was going right over my head.

I knew this seemed like pure jealousy on my part, but it wasn’t the so-called romance I begrudged him—it was the fact that it was being conducted
in my apartment
. That wasn’t the deal. I was happy to discuss Birdie’s boyfriends with him over
my morning coffee; I just didn’t feel like sharing breakfast with the actual boyfriend. Especially one who was afraid of me and the cat in equal proportion.

I did manage to get Birdie alone for a few minutes on Wednesday morning when he conned Damon into taking the dog for a walk.

“So, I guess you and Damon are a couple now? He’s gay?”

Birdie was picking his way across his bedroom floor, choosing clothes from piles that all looked equally dirty and stuffing them into a laundry bag. “Well, bi, anyway. He doesn’t like labels.”

“But you’re a couple, right?”

Birdie squirmed. “Sort of.”

“What does that mean?”

He sniffed at the armpit of a white T-shirt, then threw it back on the floor. Will Truman would not approve. “Well, we’re a couple here, at home. But not necessarily at school. I mean, we don’t flaunt it.”

Birdie had been flaunting it since before puberty. “So, Damon can’t quite get the old closet door open, huh?”

“That’s not it! I told you, he’s bi. Besides, that closet metaphor is getting tired, don’t you think? Old homos have that closet issue, but we’ve grown past it.”

“Oh, have we? You young homos are free to be you and me?”

He gave me the finger. “Damon doesn’t want homosexuality to define him. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Huh
. That was what Lee had said too. It was an issue I hadn’t thought about before, but I could see their point. You wanted people to see you as a person first. You didn’t
always want to lead with your sexuality.

“Look, Birdie, I’m just trying to point out that throwing yourself at someone who won’t admit he likes you doesn’t make for a healthy relationship.”

He propped one hand on his hip and sneered at me. “You should talk. You’re the one who keeps getting yourself mixed up with totally inappropriate people.”

“What?” I hated when he turned an argument back on me, and hated it especially when he was right.

“First you were crazy about that girl Kelly, who wasn’t even a lesbian—”

“I didn’t know that, did I?”

“And then you spent every weekend last spring running around with what’s-his-name, that straight guy who had a big crush on you.”

“Gio. Again, not my fault. As far as I was concerned we were just friends.”

“Seemed to me you felt awfully guilty about something that was not your fault.”

I didn’t have a good answer for that, so I switched topics. “That’s not your T-shirt. You’re putting Damon’s clothes into that bag too. What, are you doing his laundry now? Are you
married
?”

Birdie threw his head back in disgust. “God, Marisol, will you please go get yourself a girlfriend already and get off my back!”

*  *  *

Dad wasn’t home from work yet when we arrived Wednesday evening. Mom was helping Ellie, their cook and housekeeper,
with dinner—or possibly just getting in her way. She paused long enough to give each of us one of her patented hugs (which sometimes feel more like mugging than hugging). Damon saw it coming and tried to get away, but it was no use—Mom is an expert at corralling wayward calves. His eyes bulged as though she were squeezing the life out of him instead of the love into him.

“I’m so glad you brought your new roommate, Marisol.”

“He’s really more Birdie’s roommate than mine,” I said.

Mom figured out what that meant in no time. “Oh, how nice, Birdie! I’m thrilled for you both—you make a lovely couple!” As the newly elected president of the local chapter of PFLAG, there was nothing Mom liked better than being included in all the homosexual news. Damon’s jaw dropped and his face went pale—I made a wild guess that his mother was not as blithe about such things as mine.

“Thanks, Helen,” Birdie said as he raided the fridge for the Dr Pepper my mother kept on hand just for him. He handed one to Damon and opened one himself. “Anybody else want anything while I’m in here?”

I shook my head.

“Your father’s going to be a little late,” Mom said. “He had some papers that had to be graded by tomorrow.”

One of his favorite excuses. After all, how could you call him on it? A professor had to grade papers, didn’t he? Not that I thought he wasn’t grading papers, just that it could take him a long time to accomplish the task if he was in no hurry to get home. Birdie had always made Dad a little uncomfortable, but since our coming-out duet, Dad couldn’t seem to
handle Birdie at all. For an old guy Dad is still pretty macho. Once, Birdie came over in a pink tank top that showed off his cock-a-doodle-do tattoo (two roosters with their wings around each other), and Dad was quietly apoplectic, his eyes roaming the room for someplace to land that wasn’t Birdie’s shoulder. He knows that Birdie and I are both gay, but he doesn’t like to talk about it, and he’d rather not be forced to think about what it actually means.

Dad still wasn’t home by the time we sat down at the table.

“So, Damon,” Mom said, “I hear that you’re at Emerson College with Birdie.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Damon said, forking through his risotto as though searching for blueberries, or some other gag-worthy ingredient.

“Studying acting, too?”

“No, I want to be a director. A stage director.”

“Lots of those jobs going begging,” I said.

“Yeah, he should be a
novelist
,” Birdie said. “You can never have too many of those.”

“Where are you from originally, Damon?” Mom continued.

“Um, I was born in California, but we moved around a lot while I was growing up because of my dad’s job. The rest of my family is in Michigan now.”

“Michigan!” Mom said, as though it were some tropical paradise she longed to visit. “That’s a beautiful state, isn’t it?”

Damon shrugged. “I guess so. I haven’t seen that much of it.”

“Do you have brothers and sisters still at home?”

He nodded. “One of each. They’re thirteen and fifteen.”

“How lovely! Are they homosexual too?” she asked brightly.

At the look of shock on Damon’s face, Birdie squirted Dr Pepper out his nose.

“Well, they haven’t
said
they are,” Damon finally responded.

“I only ask because some studies say that it runs in families, but I don’t know that there’s any hard evidence for it yet. Do your parents mind?”

“Mind that I’m gay? We haven’t actually talked about it. I mean, I think they suspect that I might be . . . going in that direction.”

“If you’d like me to speak to them, I’d be happy to,” Mom said. “I’ve often advocated for young people who—”

Finally, Birdie interrupted her. “Helen, Damon is bisexual. At the moment.”

“Well, isn’t that wonderful!” my wacky mother announced.

Dad was bustling in by then. “Hello, sorry I’m late.” He crossed to my chair and gave me a brisk cheek kiss, the only kind I’d ever gotten from him. “Hello, Birdie. Glad you could all come,” he said, without actually looking at either Birdie or Damon. “What have I missed?”

“Not much,” I said. “Mom was just about to ask Damon for the details of his bisexuality.”

Dad and Damon both took on a greenish pallor.

“I was not!” Mom said. “Marisol, you’re terrible!”

“She is, Helen,” Birdie agreed. “Our girl is very bitter these days. Methinks she needs to find herself a girlfriend.”

“Methinks you’re an idiot,” I said, lobbing a green bean at his forehead.

Mom leaned over and put a hand on my arm. “Have you been meeting any new people, honey?”

“Not really.” Not anybody I’d mention to
this
crowd.

“When you go to college, you will,” she assured me. “That’s practically what college is
for
!”

“College is for learning!” Dad said huffily, banging his plate a little bit. “Not for meeting people. I don’t intend to pay a fortune for my daughter to
meet
people.”

“Well, of course it’s for learning,” Mom said in her calming voice. “But it’s also for socialization. Marisol will adore college!”

“I’ve made some great friends already,” Damon said, smiling.

“You see? Damon
loves
college!”

“Mom, you don’t have to worry,” I assured her. “I’m going to college, eventually.”