Twenty
Sam hadn’t believed her. He’d thought she would never leave the girls.
But as soon as he came down the stairs and saw the bewilderment on Clara’s face, the note in her hand, he knew he’d underestimated Nina’s unhappiness.
And her strength. Because Sam had spent his entire life perfecting the art of looking away, the sidelong glance, he understood the courage it took to face your life dead-on and walk out the door.
His ability to craft a story that sometimes ran concurrent to truth and sometimes briefly intersected with it was why he was so good at his job.
He could make an audience see what he wanted them to see.
You could convince most people of anything if you offered a highly specific narrative.
His was easy to summarize: Only child of two loving older parents.
Lively bachelorhood until he met the one person he couldn’t pass up just as he was ready to settle down.
Two daughters—one the spitting image of him, one of his wife, both smart as a whip.
Highly successful advertising executive until Xerox lured him away to work in-house and lead the marketing team.
Tough but fair boss. Loved good food, nice wine, the occasional game of tennis.
Hated golf. Hated the country club even more.
Dutiful if disinterested churchgoer. Nobody suspected he had any secrets. He’d been careful.
As a kid, Sam understood it was not okay to openly desire boys but was foggy on whether it was okay to desire them secretly.
For many years, he didn’t have a word to define his feelings but knew he was lucky in specific ways.
He was handsome and athletic and smart. Girls liked him.
He wasn’t the target of verbal or physical abuse like Billy Jensen, who lived on his street.
Sam tried not to join in when the other kids called Billy a fairy or a homo or a fag.
When he asked his mother what the words meant, she’d been annoyed.
“Don’t repeat those things. It’s not nice.
Billy’s okay,” she would say. “Just a bit peculiar.” Peculiar became the word he mentally applied to the boys who seemed like him. But even that was guesswork.
Everyone on the Amherst campus was warned not to use the men’s bathrooms at the bus station because they were populated by deviants and perverts.
Returning from his first trip home from Thanksgiving break, he casually strolled into the fetid lavatory and back to the storied last stall, which, indeed, had a middle-aged man sitting on the closed toilet seat smoking a cigarette and waiting for company.
The man dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it beneath his unexpectedly professional black wing-tipped shoe.
He gestured for Sam to come closer. He was wearing a suit, not a particularly expensive one, but well-kept.
Sam stepped into the stall and closed and latched the door behind him.
The man unzipped Sam’s pants and started to fondle him.
It was so fast and so welcome that all Sam could do was place both hands on the surrounding metal partition and try to muffle his cries.
As he was finishing, another person entered the restroom and went straight to the sink to wash his hands while singing “when Johnny comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah,” and the man on the toilet seat put a finger to his lips, motioning Sam to keep quiet while he lifted his feet off the floor to conceal his presence.
They both held their breath until the interloper exited, and as the man on the toilet reached back out for Sam he panicked.
He flew out of the bathroom and didn’t even bother trying to find a cab to campus.
He ran back, his duffel banging against his thigh, terrified of nothing in particular and everything at once.
He didn’t go to class the next day, he was so ashamed.
He took three showers and went to the barber for a crew cut, as if his hair had borne witness and might give him away.
He went to church first thing in the morning and knelt in the wooden pew, praying for forgiveness and strength, silently begging God to make him different.
He vowed abstinence and promised he would only think of women, practice self-abnegation.
It didn’t work, of course. He’d return to the bathroom in the bus station every time he came back to school and the man in the wing-tipped shoes told him about a nearby park where Sam would also go, terrified each and every time he would encounter someone dangerous, familiar, or, worst of all, an undercover vice cop.
He became furtive in action and thought, barely admitting to himself what he was doing before, during, and after, which gave the encounters a dreamy quality and allowed him to compartmentalize the touch, the arousal, the sometimes-violent orgasm not as a part of his life but as part of a smaller Sam that lived in a tiny place buried deep inside.
One of the hardest parts of all this was denying his parents something they wanted very much.
A daughter-in-law, grandchildren. If his parents suspected anything, they never let on.
His ongoing bachelorhood started to not only exhaust him—he was mildly shocked by the number of women he dated who were eager to have sex before marriage—but to get him a reputation as someone who was not serious about relationships, a careless lothario.
When he was promoted to creative director of his advertising agency at only thirty-two, his boss took him out to lunch and said that although dating a lot of women was perfectly well and fine and fun, there came a time in life when a man needed someone at home. A partner. A spouse.
So when Nina Larkin waltzed into the office one morning, all long legs and swinging brown hair and with a vibrant bemused smile, he felt something inside him stir and thought, Finally.
She’d been hired to assist the soon-to-retire office manager, but she was so competent her predecessor left earlier than expected—out of relief or embarrassment.
Nina not only had a way with organization and systems, but she had good creative instincts.
Once, taking notes during a meeting where he and his staff were brainstorming ideas for a campaign for the local telephone company and talking about using animated cartoon characters, he said, “I don’t know.
What are we missing here about telephones? ”
“They connect people,” Nina said, looking up, not hesitating to contribute in the slightest. “Cartoons are funny, but they’re not emotional.
” She was right. Sam won his fifth Clio for the “Only Connect” campaign.
He invited Nina as his date and they got tipsy and laughed all night, and when the winner was announced, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek before he took the stage.
He thought, I’m saved. By the time he knelt at the altar on his wedding day, he’d stopped believing that God would come to his rescue.
Praying felt like calling someone who never answered, but he believed in himself.
He believed he could harness temperance, fidelity, and change with Nina by his side.
But of course—
He was always careful, but he wasn’t always scrupulous.
Once, in Chicago on business, his hotel was near a small bar called the Wagging Wheel, and he noticed a lot of men—only men—going in and out.
One night, he had three quick drinks in the hotel bar and strolled down the block.
He stood on the sidewalk watching the bar’s door for nearly an hour until he worked up the courage to walk in, head lowered, ready to cut and run if the scene was wrong, but it wasn’t wrong at all.
Men of all ages, casually talking at the bar, some playing pool in the back room.
Ella Fitzgerald was on the jukebox, and a few couples were slow dancing in the corner.
The feeling of the place was warm and curious.
He ordered a drink and talked a little to the bartender who recommended an exhibit at the art museum and to another man who told him about a great rib joint near Wrigley Field.
He left quickly but went back the next night and the night after that and both times brought someone back to his hotel room.
The encounters left him briefly exhilarated and swiftly flattened by shame.
He told himself every time he was getting it out of his system, but what happened instead was that he took in the full possibility of himself, and that self was growing larger.
After Chicago, things got sloppier. Like his frequent visit to the third dressing room on the right at the JCPenney downtown, which had phone numbers of interested men scrawled in pencil near the hook to hang clothes.
He told himself that because what he was doing was purely sexual in nature, a necessary release, it was okay.
Something that allowed him to focus on being a good father and provider.
He endured sex with Nina until she seemed to lose interest, which he assumed was normal after having two babies.
She was tired. He was tired. Sometimes they’d hold hands.
Kisses became pecks. He’d believed he could probably continue with the bifurcated life he’d created for a long time. Forever. Until he met Garret.