Thirty-Nine
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Sam said to an inexplicably sanguine Garret.
“Not surprised,” he said. “You know what they used to call Rochester, right?”
“Friend, you’re living it. Company town. Complacent. Safe. Smug. But not for long. A lack of vision isn’t only going to sink Xerox. Kodak’s heading in the same direction. And then what does the city become?”
The first thought that sprang to Sam’s mind was Finnegan’s.
But he shook it off. The economic future of Rochester wasn’t his problem.
Once he packed a box with his small collection of belongings and handed in his ID to the security people at Xerox Square and waved good-bye to the building and the adjacent Midtown Plaza and drove out of his dedicated parking space in the underground parking lot for the final time, he felt elated. Released.
A few years later, with Bridie’s and Clara’s blessings, he sold the house on Cambridge Road.
He thought Bridie might object since she still didn’t have a place of her own, but she was supportive and enthusiastic.
A pleasant surprise until he realized her relief stemmed from finally having an excuse to live with her mother and Finn.
Or rather, no excuse not to. But even then, even after that first pang of resentment, he softened.
He was finding it harder and harder to maintain outrage at his circumstances, or to continue to be aggrieved by Nina’s refashioned life, which looked a whole lot like her old life.
Same neighborhood. Same community. A new set of frustrations with no clear fix.
According to Bridie, an unwitting but efficient source of information between the two households, Nina barely cooked anymore.
Apparently, cocktail hour started very early at the new Mr. and Mrs. Finnegan’s home, and one of Helen Harper’s lackeys delivered prepared food on the nights Nina and Finn didn’t eat out.
Sam didn’t want to buy another house right away.
He wasn’t looking for another job. His voluntary retirement package had been generous, he still had a healthy nest egg from the money his parents had left, and if he was smart about the gains from selling the house, the truth was he wouldn’t have to work again.
What on earth would that feel like? When Garret invited him to come to San Francisco for as long as he wanted—weeks, months, whatever—he thought, Why not? and bought a one-way ticket.
“Full disclosure,” Garret said, his first night there. “I’m not interested in monogamy.”
Sam had never thought he was moving to San Francisco to start a relationship with Garret, monogamous or not, and although he didn’t say so he was relieved.
He wanted to be alone. Truly single. Those early months were heady.
The gay community in the Bay Area wasn’t just out of the closet—they were, in Sam’s opinion, out of their ever-loving minds.
He was assiduously trying to loosen up as Garret so often admonished him, but the hardened carapace he had so deliberately crafted for decades was not easily cracked.
Garret also pestered him about coming out, especially to his daughters.
The girls were adults, Garret reminded him repeatedly over the years.
Didn’t he deserve to live in his truth? It was 1979, 1983, 1986, not the homosexual dark ages anymore!
“Your daughters are curious and engaged people. You are not giving them enough credit.”
Perhaps. It wasn’t that Sam didn’t understand Garret’s logic; he just couldn’t see his way through to the other side.
He couldn’t imagine running into his former coworkers, neighbors, friends while he was with another man.
He couldn’t imagine telling Bridie and Clara and having them connect his behavior to Nina’s leaving.
His disclosure would free Nina to tell the girls her version of the truth.
Coming out would mean another parent who wasn’t what they’d thought, and they would resent him, possibly forever.
Or so he imagined. Until Clara came to town.
She had finally been able to quit her job at the hated Irish pub and was doing something else with food and had a small break between projects and asked if she could visit.
Sam offered to put her up at a nice hotel near Union Square and they spent a few days seeing all the sights.
The Golden Gate. Ghirardelli Square. The Cannery and the Wharf.
Coit Tower. She told him about working with Joy and all she was learning about food styling, which he found interesting if a little perplexing.
“You don’t miss the cooking part?” he asked.
She thought for a minute. “I still cook, but mostly for photographs not for people. And no, I don’t miss it.”
Sam hadn’t seen Clara so upbeat or enthusiastic for many years. It was fun, this new poised version of his daughter, describing her own life, witnessing his with curiosity. He knew he had to finally have an honest conversation with her, but didn’t know how to start.
On her last day, they drove out to a little oyster shack in Point Reyes.
Clara was smitten with the place. “Look at these oyster shells,” she said, laying them all out along their table after they’d slurped down the sweet meat.
They were beautiful, with dramatic ridges and edges formed by the sea, all grays and whites and deep purples.
The insides pearlescent and smooth. “I could style the shit out of these,” Clara said.
She asked the restaurant owner if she could have them, and he took them in the back to soak the shells clean and put them in bubble wrap for her.
While they were waiting, Clara cleared her throat and said, “So. You don’t live with Garret anymore? ”
“I was only ever staying with him temporarily. My place is small and it’s a sublet, but I like it.”
“You’re still friends?”
“Of course.” Sam understood he had an opening, but he didn’t know how to walk through. Clara did. “Dad,” she said, “I want to know if you’re being careful.”
“I’m always careful. San Francisco is a big city, but—”
“Dad,” Clara said softly. “I’m not talking about that.
Bridie is freaking out, and to be honest, so am I a little.
She hasn’t known how to say any of this to you, but the clinic where she’s interning right now is the city’s biggest testing site for AIDS.
She’s started to counsel patients when they get their test results. It’s intense.”
“Bridie’s doing that?”
“She is. Believe it or not, she claims she hasn’t cried once.
” They both smiled and Sam ducked his head, feeling bashful.
Clara continued, her voice calm but grave.
“I see what’s happening every day in New York.
So many friends of mine in the industry are sick.
Many have died. Your daughters need to know you’re being careful. We love you.”
He started to speak, and his impulse was to object, deny, deflect, but why? Clara took his hand, and for one debilitating moment he feared he was going to cry. “I promise you I’ll be careful,” he said.
Clara leaned over and kissed his cheek. “That’s all we needed to hear.”
Running the very brief conversation over in his head later that night, he was relieved but also uncomfortable.
To be offered—without even asking!—the kind of consideration and understanding Clara had never been able to extend to Nina seemed unfair.
But it wasn’t his job to try to mend that rupture.
He didn’t know who could, but he knew it wasn’t him.
In the meantime, keeping his promise to the girls would be embarrassingly easy.
He was, perhaps, way too careful about everything.
The problem, Sam realized very shortly after settling into life in San Francisco, was that he had only thought of his homosexuality as a sexual drive, and it was clear that everyone around him was building an entire identity around being out and gay.
Flamboyant had always felt like a dirty word to Sam because it was coded, a slur, but walking down the Castro with Garret and their larger group of friends, he saw flamboyance as a reclamation, an exuberant choice.
All these men, these beautiful men who didn’t care how they appeared to anyone.
Sam was alternately gleeful and reluctant.
Was this what he was? he thought, sipping a beer and watching a man even older than he prance around the bar wearing white Lycra leggings that left nothing to the imagination, a rainbow tank top, a goatee, and roller skates?
Garret seemed to find it all amusing and landed confidently somewhere between Lycra pants and Sam’s wardrobe of polo shirts, but Sam couldn’t get a fix on where he fit.
He couldn’t even figure out what he wanted.
His dalliances (“Dalliances?” Garret said, laughing.
“What century are we in?”) were satisfying and that was good but then he felt empty.
He knew there had to be men more like him in San Francisco, but his social skills had been corrupted by furtiveness.
How to tell if the two men having lunch at a restaurant looking flirty but wearing chinos and Oxford shirts were gay?
One night, a few margaritas in, Garret convinced Sam to join their “centipede team” for the annual Bay to Breakers race.
The bar was loud and noisy, but from what he could gather the “team” would all wear the same costume and somehow be tethered to one another?
“We don’t go fast,” Garret assured him, “probably like a speedy trot, but it’s fun. It’s a wild scene and a great party.”
How much wilder could a scene get in this town?
He would remind himself of that naive thought when it became clear that their team was joining the legion of nude racers.
The team costume: helmets. Any kind of helmet.
Construction, football, bicycle, astronaut.
The rest of the costume? Buck naked. Without telegraphing his panic and distaste, Sam claimed an astronaut helmet.
At least nobody would see his face. “Socks and shoes are okay!” Garret yelled to the team on the day of the race.
“All other clothing goes into this duffel,” he said, walking down the line as the group disrobed.
Sam carefully folded his underwear and shorts and tucked them on top of his head beneath the helmet like everyone else was doing so they’d have some clothes at the ready when they crossed the finish line.
The worst part of the race was not the crowds, the exposure, the hills, the noise, it was his balls beating against his inner thighs for two hours.
The day was warm for San Francisco, and it felt like his testicles got slightly larger with every mile.
Before the race started, he assumed the hardest part would be running uphill or the claustrophobic helmet or his internal mortification, but all those things receded and as he tried to ignore the throbbing pain in his nether region, he realized this was not meant to be his new life.
One night, some weeks later, without telling anyone because he knew how roundly he’d be mocked, he took himself to the Top of the Mark for a drink.
He looked through the clothes in the very back of his closet, the ones he hadn’t touched since leaving Rochester and took out a suit.
A perfectly pressed shirt. A silk regimental striped tie and his gleaming Johnston & Murphy brogues.
Pulling on dress socks, he started to feel like himself again, like he was reoccupying a familiar body, and he didn’t know if it was a good thing or a pathetic thing.
The doorman at the hotel greeted him with a tip of the hat and he passed through the revolving door to the quiet hush of an upscale lobby perfumed with lilies.
On a Tuesday night, the bar was quiet, and he asked for a table near a window.
He ordered a scotch on the rocks and sat quietly.
He felt restored to himself. As much as he wanted to let loose, he didn’t think he had it in him.
He’d paid close attention to all the conversations he’d had with formerly closeted gay men like, he supposed, himself.
The relief, the joy, the freedom they talked about, he didn’t feel it.
He wanted to, but he didn’t. He felt like an outsider in the promised land and that was a new, profoundly discomfiting kind of loneliness.
He could sense Garret’s frustration with him and knew the larger group of friends felt the same.
He understood. He was, he assumed, a big drag.
And then, Clara’s admonishment. So many men were sick, dying.
All the arguing in his circle about whether or not the disease was transferred through sex.
Most of the men he knew disregarded the campaign of caution.
Garret was convinced the rumors were planted to stop the debauchery of the burgeoning homosexual population.
But Sam was nervous. And their friend Adam who was a nurse said he was becoming temporarily celibate until they had a treatment or a cure and they should all do the same.
Sam didn’t want to panic, but it would be just his luck to get stricken down by a disease that targeted gay men after finally deciding to declare himself as one.
He ended up walking back to the apartment because it was a beautiful night.
Almost every night in San Francisco was beautiful, even the ones velveted by fog and mist. The foghorns crying lonesomely in the bay were possibly the most romantic sound he’d ever heard.
Slightly buzzed and pleasantly loosened from the evening alone, he walked into his living room, picked up the phone, and booked an airline ticket home for the very next day.