50
“It doesn’t even make sense,” Tennyson says, staring at the strawberry shake in front of him.
We’re at some hot dog place on Magazine Street. I don’t know why. Oliver said he wanted fries, though now that they’re sitting in front of him, he’s not eaten a single one.
“It’s actually more common than you’d think,” I say, but no one says anything back.
“Maybe they hooked up once, and he’s blackmailing him with the house,” Tennyson says, sounding hopeful, and yes, that’s a weird thing to hope for, but I let it slide this time.
“He isn’t,” I say, positive of at least that much.
“How do you know?” Tennyson asks loudly.
I catch eyes with Sam for a few seconds before I look back at Tenny. “We’re all named after poets.”
“What?” Tennyson blinks before he says, “And so?”
I’ll explain it later, I guess. Our father’s lover’s college major isn’t my primary concern right now.
Sam’s just staring at Oli with a worried bend in his brow, and Tennyson isn’t worried about Oliver, but I think that’s fair enough. I think his world is caving in on itself for the second time in a fortnight.
And that younger older brother of mine, who my heart is so aching for—I reach for his arm and touch it gently.
“Are you okay?” I ask him, and he’s staring directly at me but isn’t all at once, so I say his name. “Oliver?”
“What?” He blinks a few times, as though he’s coming to.
“Are you okay?” I ask again.
“I—” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Am I validated or devastated?”
“You can be both,” Sam tells him.
“Or neither,” I offer. “There are no prerequisites or parameters to how or what you should be feeling right now.”
Oliver nods. He doesn’t hear what I’m saying though, and something about how he looks makes me feel so nervous and so on edge, and so I sort of just keep talking to try to make him feel better.
“Angry, relieved, betrayed, happy, vindicated—whatever it is, all of it would be fine, and all of it could be true, and still nothing about anything that’s happened in our family’s treatment of you up until this moment will ever be permissible.”
Oliver stares at me; his eyes look glazed over.
“Which is all to say”—I try to give him a reassuring look, and God, have you ever tried to give someone a reassuring look when you’re not sure of anything?—“as has always been the case, their treatment of you has nothing to do with you.”
And the way Oliver’s eyes move, I feel like he heard that part. At least, I hope he did. Sam catches my eye, gives me a small, subtle smile that makes me think he’s maybe proud of me, or something—which is sweet, but also, it’s not as subtle as no smile.
“Do you think Mom knows?” Oliver asks the table.
“No.” Tennyson shakes his head, not a doubt in his mind. “There’s no way—”
“Well,” I cut in, giving him an apologetic look. “At least not consciously.”
“Stop.” My oldest brother rolls his eyes, exasperated. “Gige, not everyone can read—”
“No, Tennyson,” I interrupt again, because of this I’m sure. “Everyone can. And not just can, they do.”
Sam puts his arms on the table, leans in, interested. And what I’m saying is interesting, and they should all probably lean in, but just Sam does, which is strike a million against him at this point.
“It’s why everyone’s always banging on about vibes,” I go on. “That’s not some hippy-dippy new whatever we’ve just discovered—it’s people picking up on the tiny inexplicable things that they see without knowing they see it.”
Tennyson’s eyes pinch, suspiciously.
“So no, I don’t think Mom consciously knows Dad was having a decades-long affair with another man,” I say, eyebrows up. “But I do suspect she will have wondered over the course of their relationship whether he could possibly be attracted to men.”
Tennyson drops his head in his hands and exhales. He sounds grieved.
And that’s fair, don’t you think?
It doesn’t feel homophobically charged; it feels like he just found out his father isn’t who he thought he was. I mean, fuck, I get it—our father isn’t who I thought he was either. Even if the version of him we just uncovered is one I’m slightly more interested in knowing than the one I thought he was, he’s still a stranger now. But then, I suppose he was always a stranger to me and to Oliver. He made himself that way to us. Kept his paternal distance. I wonder if he did that because he saw flecks of his true self in us and found it confronting or painful?
I wonder if he’s just an absolute fucking prick?
I guess either way, he’s the latter. I don’t think you can slice him in a way right now where that isn’t at least the smallest bit true. Or the biggest.
What kind of person lets his children be treated how Oliver was treated—how I was treated—when he too was gay and he too was an adulterer? I’m not even a fucking adulterer, really.
And he died thinking I was.
I don’t know why that thought suddenly makes my heart feel like its knees have been capped, but it does, and I take this big breath that I think will just be a breath, but when I do, it’s all staggered and full of feelings I wouldn’t ever usually show at a table of people, because as it happens, all of those people at said table stare at me.
Across Sam’s face flickers that dangerous concern for me again, and I try to placate him indirectly with a smile before I climb over Tennyson to get out of the booth.
“Are you good?” my brother calls after me.
I nod back. “Just gotta pee.”
I don’t though; I just need a minute. I go into the stall, shut the door, and lean back against it. I let myself feel for a minute the grotesque weight of it all. The years of lies that have pressed down on our whole family, squashing and contorting our lives and selves. Who might we all have been if truth was allowed to live under our roof?
“Gige?” calls this perfect, Australian voice, and I squeeze my eyes tight shut.
“You okay?” He taps on the door gently. I sigh quietly—not because I don’t want him in here, checking on me—I do, of course I do—but because of course I’m not.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” is what I say back.
“I don’t care,” he says without a second thought.
I don’t care either; that’s the bad part.
I open the stall door, and he’s standing at there, waiting for me. Our eyes lock, and it’s with a wonderful kind of in-sync-ness that what happens next is suddenly happening.
There are a lot of theories as to why people like to have sex when they’re under immense stress or, say, like, about to die (as per every disaster movie ever). Whether it’s an exertion of control, self-soothing with the oxytocin our system floods us with, good, old-fashioned post-disaster sex, or just the shameful cliche of not wanting to feel alone.
God, what does it say about who I am, that my father—knowing who he himself was—still found me unpalatable enough to spend a great deal of his life avoiding me?
It’s almost like a sore relief to have Sam’s hands on my body after today. My mind has been in a constant state of aching, but him touching me feels like a cool compress. And it escalates quickly, from us kissing in the bathroom to Sam boosting me up around his waist and the fly of his jeans undone and me pressed up against the bathroom stall and—
“I fucking knew it.”
And I just freeze. My eyes are closed still, and I keep them closed for a second longer because when I open them next, I’ll see my brother’s face, and it’ll be all marred with hurt and betrayal, and so it should be. Everything will be fucked once I open them, so I just leave them for a second.
Sam speaks first—which is good of him, bad of me.
“Ol,” Sam starts.
My eyes are open now, in time to see my brother backing out the door, shaking his head at me in painful disbelief.
“How could you?” he says just to me. He’s not talking to Sam, it’s me. I’m the problem. I think I might always be the problem?
“Oliver—” I reach for him, but he jerks away from me.
“No!” he spits, then his voice trails. “Don’t you…” He looks me up and down. He doesn’t even glance at Sam. “Fuck you.”
And then he spins on his heel and darts away.