The Paternity Test (9 page)

Becky and I were named to the Ad Hoc Symbol Committee, saddled with proposing—and selling to alums—an inoffensive replacement for the school’s Redskin mascot. In a room full of graybeards, we were the only students, and had to bond, if only by default. But there was nothing default about Becky. She came from Manitoba, the middle of the prairie, and had, like her homeland, a stark, windblown beauty. The latest in a long MacLeod lineage of bagpipers, she pitted her buffed-clean looks against a smutty wit. Her frank, focused gaze and her buck teeth intrigued me; she seemed to be hankering after something.

At every session, we sat together, a subcommittee of two, passing bitchy notes that often ended: “Eek! Burn this!” We dubbed our little private support group Obstreperous Anonymous.

The night before the final vote—our last chance at influence—I asked Becky over to my place so we could plan. “How about some pizza? Some Coke and Captain Morgan?”—my standard fare for pulling all-nighters. Sounded fun, she said, and she would bring the weed:
her
standard fare for any evening.

I was living off-campus in a tiny, stinky studio, big enough for a futon, not much else. Becky acted as if it were a marvel of less-is-more. She praised my Frank O’Hara broadsheet, my framed ACT UP poster, my thick book of Mapplethorpe portraits. “May I?” she asked, making the book a bed tray on her lap, and emptied out her fragrant bag of pot. She did some expert sorting work—seeds from flaky leaves—then fashioned an impressive-looking joint.

When half the joint was history, passed and passed between us, Becky kissed its glowing end to stunt it. “Ah,” she said. “That’s better. Now we can do business.”

The Symbol Committee’s fogies favored lumbering clichés—their top choices were Trojans and Rams—and I was hoping to push them in the opposite direction, toward something less martial, less male.

“Less,” said Becky, “like a brand name for rubbers?”

Other schools had already taken gender-neutral names, but none was especially inspiring. Dartmouth’s was the Big Green (“Big green
what
?” asked Becky); the Crimson Tide sounded like a plague.

The two of us, stymied, smoked the joint’s remainder. We freshened our drinks. The world’s edges melted.

“Think big now,” I said. “Really big. Sky’s the limit.”

“The Stars?” she tried. “Or . . . the Black Holes? Something astronomical.”

“Something
gastronomical
? Maybe the Appetizers?”

“No,” she said. “Better: Appe
teasers
.”

The ring of it (or the rum, or the weed, or all three) knocked us down ditzily together. Crooning the word, we squeezed each other’s thighs with galled delight. I found my thumb tickling her nipple.

Becky paused, the look in her eyes startled, surreptitious. “But Pat,” she said.

“But what?”

“I thought you liked boys.”

“I
do
,” I said, and saying it—so surely, in this context—sent a zap of pure erotic lightning through my limbs. I pushed her to the floor; the rest seemed predetermined: fingers, lips, tongues, interlocking. Her mouth tasted smoky and alcoholic, like a party.

For weeks our sex was like that: fiery, free-falling. A renovation— letting ourselves be razed and then remade.

Liberated from my previous impossible expectations (that girls should set me right, should cure me), I could finally get and give a more complete enjoyment. I wasn’t hiding anything from her, or from myself.

Together, though, we
did
hide, we kept our lust secret from the world—and oh, it was scrumptious! A freer kind of furtiveness than I had ever known before, without the guilt:
normalcy
as transgression. Some nights I would saunter home from chairing Queer Nation to find Becky waiting, buck-naked. “Careful,” I’d say, laughing, my cock already hard. “If anyone found out, I’d be ruined.”

Was this what love, unencumbered, felt like?

I tried to write a sonnet about it, which ended up as crap, but maybe the main simile was a keeper. Every year, at Christmas, my family went to Killington, and what I waxed poetic about, for fourteen lines, was skiing: not the pell-mell speed or the chairlift’s lofty view but the time at day’s end when you doffed your fat boots and your feet felt like helium balloons. Being with Becky was like that. A moonwalk.

The Symbol Committee wrapped things up—the vote went ten to two for Rams—but Becky and I were only just beginning. We spent a long weekend at a Poconos lodge. The soft-touch manager asked if we were newlyweds, and we said yes, which got us a room upgrade, on the house. It also got us talking about our plans: marriage, kids. “Adding a few more pipers to the band,” Becky called it. “Yes,” I said. “Absolutely!” My parents would be so happy, and so, I thought assuredly, would I. “I guess we should start ‘rehearsing’ right now, don’t you think?”

Afterward I asked her if I’d have to wear a kilt. “You know, at the wedding. Please don’t say you’ll make me?” The MacLeod of Lewis tartan was a sickly mustard hue.

Becky said, “And so what if ? What’s so wrong with a kilt? Scared that folks’ll think you’re a
pansy
?”

How fine it was to have a girl and still to have
myself
.

One night I came home, abuzz, from Queer Nation, full of dizzy talk about a boy: a freshman from the hockey team (a freshman! from the hockey team!) who’d shown up, proclaiming he was gay. Ryan Harris: corn-blond hair, a wrinkled, nervous smile, forearms you could build a cabin out of. Ryan wanted to write a biting op-ed for the campus daily, on homophobia in the varsity sports system. I’d volunteered to help him with his draft.

Becky had been lying in wait, naked, on the futon; I undressed and lay down beside her. Then I boinged back up, my finger in the air, a mad doctor struck by inspiration. “Oh,” I said. “Oh ho ho! What a smashing idea!” I spoke in the goofy private mode we’d developed. “Let’s not have children of our own, let’s
adopt
. In fact, let’s adopt Ryan Harris! He’s potty-trained already, and there’s no blood relation, so fucking him wouldn’t quite be incest. Can we, Beckles? Please? Pretty please?”

Becky rose—getting ready, I thought, for a dive. She did that when she felt extra-giddy with attraction: a flying leap, an all-body smother. But now she walked away, plodding toward the bathroom. Without looking back at me, she said, “It isn’t nice. It’s not nice and . . . actually, it’s nasty.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Hey. What’s happening here? C’mon.”

Becky turned and faced me. Her features looked runny.

“Beck, I was kidding,” I said. “That’s what we do. We kid.”

“You think it doesn’t hurt? Hearing you go on and on?
Ooh, he’s so hot, he’s so hot
.”

I got up and went to her and held her in my arms. “But sweetie. You know I’m gay. You’ve known that since we met.”

“What I’ve known—I’ve
thought
I’ve known,” she said, “was that you’re mine.”

It took just a week, then, for everything to crumble. I promised I’d commit to her. Or, well, make
this
commitment: she would be the only woman, ever, I had sex with.

No, not enough, she said.
Person
. The only person.

Becky and I had clambered to the summit of Not Quite. Which seemed not an inch above nowhere.

She was a year ahead; she finished school and split. (A mutual friend reported she had moved to coastal Maine and was dating a Damariscotta oyster farmer.) As for me, in my senior year? I focused all my fantasies on grad school.

NYU took me for their semiotics program—all that work on the Symbol Committee had given me an interest. It wasn’t my first choice but a bargain with my dad: not law school, thank God, but not “that touchy-feely stuff ” (his judgment of an MFA in poetry) or, worse, being “some sort of professional homosexual” (the Human Rights Campaign Fund, knowing of my activism, had offered me a lobbying position). Semiotics: obscure enough to thumb my father’s eye but rigorous, inarguably weighty. My dad acquiesced to its complicated sound, the relative respectability it offered.

Respectability? If only he had known.

The first man I had—okay, who had
me
—was a transit cop who stopped me at the Bleecker Street station, asking if I needed any help. A ringer for my AP English teacher, Mr. Prior: monobrowed, kneelike jaw, tall, senatorial; the name patch on his pocket said Toomey. I was still considering what to say, when he said, “Good,” and led me to a secret airless room that smelled of oil. He came up with a condom—an uncle with a magic coin—and shoved my fledgling self from the nest. Panic at first, my legs no good, my heart a skidding wheel. But then,
fup!
—my wings caught air, and everything went weightless.

After we wiped up, I wanted to trade numbers.

Toomey laughed. “You’re cute, but that’s not how it works. Don’t worry, you won’t need
me
again.”

How could I have guessed how right he was?

It turned out that not being a “professional homosexual” didn’t preclude a full-time occupation in gay sex. The textbooks I was studying said Derrida, Foucault, but what I crammed—in bodegas, on St. Mark’s Place—was men. Each day was a course in
applied
semiotics, all the codes and signs (tilt of hips, shade of tie) that gave away who could be had, and almost never did I have the same man more than twice. New York: the cruise park that never sleeps.

Yes, there was the virus, which dangled all our “little deaths” high above the chasm of the big one. But we fucked at the frantic pace of soldiers weekend-furloughed, the taste of battle smoke still in our nostrils. Even ACT UP meetings were a carnival of flirting. After every die-in I got laid.

The Pat who had planned to don a kilt and marry Becky? I told myself that he was like our college’s Redskin mascot, a relic from a quaint, plainer past.

This was just about the time that Joseph, as he’d say, “discovered” me—as though he were a mogul, and I a budding starlet, and gay life was the greatest show on earth. He took me home: not for sex—he’d never say he wanted that—but rather to show me his signed copy of
A Streetcar Named Desire
(“To J, a fellow passenger, with affection”), proof that he had once had “carnal knowledge” of its author. Passing me the book he let his hand alight on mine. “And now you’ve touched the hand,” he said, “that jerked the cock of Tenn. And
that
is how we fags make family trees.”

Having disclosed this story, he asked for one of mine. “Or more than one. Your whole erotic history. Don’t hold back.”

I told him of my catholic tastes, my years of sex with girls.

“Yuck,” he said. “The thought.”

“But no,” I said, “I liked it. The sex and also something else: not feeling the pressure to be so ‘other.’”

“Pat,” he said, “don’t kid yourself,” his voice freezing over. “You
are
‘other.’ That is what we are.”

The world required categories, and I was now this thing: a man who picked up men for sex and rarely learned their names. That was what it meant to be gay, right? Why make a ruckus over the former version of me that hadn’t flouted cultural conventions, even if I felt him still inside me? I heeded Joseph; I dropped the old Pat.

Soon enough, too, I dropped semiotics, which seemed more and more like an esoteric evasion of the new, no-pretensions world I lived in.
Clarify, clarify
, that was now my dogma. I withdrew from NYU, and sold back all my texts. “What are you going to do now?” my parents both demanded. “Don’t expect us to support you.” I didn’t think to worry. Worrying was my old way. I was sure I’d find something good.

What I found, through Joseph? My schoolbook gig at Educraft, a calling that depended on forthrightness. Then, like a reward, a prize for having changed, I found the clearest thing of all: Stu.

Gorgeous Stu. Stand-up Stu. My life.

Being with Stu I didn’t feel gay, straight, or elsewise, I felt only— wholly—like myself. Stu was my fruition, the
x
I’d been solving for. He roused again the Pat who would be happy to settle down.

But Stu’s only rule, as I said earlier, was: no rules. That was the creed of all the guys—the gays—who surrounded us. We had all decided upon the same way to be different.

I never told Stu about Becky, the life I’d almost led, the truth that I
could
have led that life. At first, I stayed quiet to keep my gayness burnished—worried that Stu, like Joseph, would object. Then, before I knew it (or so went my excuse),
too soon to safely tell
had turned into
too late
. Stu would have bristled if I’d sprung it on him then:
Why didn’t you say anything before?
Even years later, when we started talking kids, I chose not to tell him of my past. I wanted him to feel that we were breaking ground together—as truly, for the most part, we were.

The secret wasn’t painful to keep; I would not have said I felt regret. I loved the life I’d chosen with Stu and all our outcast comrades: unremorsefully gay and apart. At least at first I’d loved it, when it meant liberation, before our brand of liberation became a kind of trap.

And now, on the Cape, with a baby in the offing, the path I had abandoned and the one I’d taken were merging. I might manage to make an end run around letdown.

Only now and then would I think of windblown Becky, and let myself feel the pinch of loss—as though I had moved to a more embracing neighborhood but kept my old house key and sometimes thumbed its ridges, longing for the place I once lived.

At the Pancake King we had all agreed to wait a week, but the phone rang at eight the next morning.

“I’m listening to NPR,” she said—no “Good morning” or “It’s Debora”—“and the story, it’s a man who finds a baby in the subway!”

“Debora,” I mouthed to Stu, and switched to speakerphone.

“Just lying there,” she went on, “in the station, in a blanket. He takes it to the cops, and when no one comes to get it, they ask him would he like to raise it. Not just him, but his boyfriend also—both. Can you believe? They say gays can’t be parents, but now, when the heteros, they don’t do what they should, the government asks the gays to help out.”