Slut Lullabies (5 page)

Miguel did not have much legroom in the passenger's seat of Chad's car. The floor apparently functioned as a trashcan; at his feet were discarded wrappers of apple pie and Styrofoam containers with hardened salad dressing leaking out the sides. The back seat was filled with newspapers, floor to ceiling. In the trunk, which Chad had opened to get money for dinner, were two industrial-sized buckets overflowing with quarters. Miguel pulled his knees in tight against the bucket seat. “Uh, what's with the car?”

“This is my office,” Chad said. “I'm on the move all the time. I go to court to fight Daley's people, and then I come down here to pay my workers and collect rent from my tenants. I work seven days a week out of this car. It's not a datemobile.”

“Where
is
the datemobile?” Miguel asked. “Did your father loan you money to buy that, too, but you drive the dump to blend in when you're slumming?”

Chad stared back, blank. His cheeks were the pink of models in J. Crew ads, of Harvard,
Love Story
boys. Miguel wanted to see sweat break out on his forehead when he entered him without lube; he wanted to see the blond dampen to brown.

“None of this is very old compared to European architecture anyway.” Miguel shrugged. “
That's
history—this is just poverty. If you like crumbling deterioration so much, forget the South Side—these are palaces. You'd be euphoric in the third world.”

By the time they arrived safely back on the North Side and hit Roscoe's for a midnight drink, Chad's alcoholic ex (who'd introduced them) was already toasted at the bar. He dragged Miguel to the toilet and pinched his arm too hard to be a come-on. “What the fuck?” he said. “Chad thinks you hate his guts.”

“One can never look the fool by looking skeptical,” Miguel said.

X was too drunk to have a rosy glow; he resembled a silver-yellow liver. When he shook his head like Miguel was the saddest thing he'd ever seen, it was unconvincing.

“You
are
a fool,” X said. “That man's an urban hero—he's adorable—every guy in Chicago lusts him, and he's been pining after you all summer, you moody little freak.”

“Leave me alone,” Miguel said. “I hate earnest boys.”

“You hate yourself,” X said. “Welcome to my club.”

Though Chicago was a big city, the gay community much larger than Barcelona's, somehow all fags still knew one another, and a bad date could never be shaken off. Chad continued to appear, flushed with enthusiasm and tussled in his feckless, rich-boy way, every time Miguel hit the bars with his friends. Miguel took to drinking heavily at the bar with X while the others boogied on the dance floor.

Chad could not dance. His hips seemed welded between stomach and thigh; he could not move them without his entire body convulsing unsteadily back and forth, and after a few moments of this exhausting gesture, Chad would settle into a subtle, side-stepping motion that Miguel remembers practicing alone in his bedroom before his first school dance in the States. Once, nursing Glenlivets with X, Miguel thought to prove how uninterested he was in Chad by targeting the hottest man in the vicinity and telling the bartender to send him a drink. But when the bartender delivered the beer and turned to point out Miguel, Miguel suddenly panicked—WASPs were not accustomed to working for things; what if Chad simply gave up?—and crouched to hide, stumbling out of the bar area amid guffaws from X.

X must have clued the rest of the guys in, because somehow, staggering through Lincoln Park in a drunken cluster en route to a party, everyone managed to inexplicably free himself and hop into a cab in the span of three minutes, leaving Miguel and Chad gaping at one another. Miguel's hands burrowed deeply in his pockets. Woody Allen-like he shuffled, muttering, “I guess we'd better go home.” They stood directly in front of a straight bar called Déjà Vu. When Miguel bumped into a sign proclaiming TANGO CONTEST, Chad grabbed his arm and directed, “Come on. Let's go in.”

In Barcelona, Miguel once attempted to attend a Gay Pride parade only to find thirty lesbians hanging around haphazardly, smoking cigarettes and ambling down the Ramblas at a pace at which you'd walk to the dentist. Men in Spain were not “out,” he was told; they all lived at home with their mothers. It was a Catholic, machismo country; unemployment was high, and young men needed parental help—what could be done? Miguel told his Chicago friends that he'd left for that reason: he could not live among the closeted when he had been out since age eighteen. Of course, in truth he'd left because Tomas, the love of his life, owner of the world's most perfect profile, and a man whose casual way of draping one ankle over the opposite knee was so perfectly European that simply
being
European could not adequately account for it, had been found with his mouth around one of Miguel's English students—a “straight” seventeen-year-old. Oh, and because without Tomas, he was homeless, lived on nothing but corn nuts and canned tuna, lost thirty pounds, used his key to sneak into the language school at night and sleep on the floor, got caught and fired, answered an ad for a male escort service only to be told his ass was too skinny for even desperate old trolls to pay to fondle it, accepted wired money from Miriam (who had to lie to her husband and pay her rent late), and bought a ticket home one week before his thirtieth birthday and the official beginning of his life as a bitter old man. Now here was Chad, beaming beside him, saying, “
You
must know how to tango,” and Miguel, champion of open homosexuality and fleer of Spanish repression (and who did not, in fact, know how to tango), could think of no reply quick or politically correct enough to prevent being whirled around the floor of a straight, yuppie bar by the WASP with the incredibly convulsing pelvis.

When the D.J. announced the winner—“Two guys who can't dance but gotta be awarded for nerve”—Chad kissed him amid the raucous cheers of breeder bar-goers aflutter with the illusion of having gotten into a kitschy drag show without paying a cover charge. Miguel fled the bar; Chad followed. Six months later, they bought a house.

When they go to visit Mami and Carlos, her American husband, Chad helps Carlos build a garage out back. At restaurants, he holds Miguel's hands across the table, then manages to schmooze his way into complimentary dessert and champagne. His logic (“Why are gay patrons so afraid to show a little affection when the chef is obviously a queen and so are all the waiters—isn't that silly?”), seems to cause the world to click into place around them, adapting to common sense according to Chad.

Despite having guns pulled on him, his car being vandalized, jumping out the window during a drug bust in one of his “abandoned” buildings, and being punched in the face every month or so, he emerges each day from the city's roughest neighborhoods flawlessly bright and chatty.

And so in a similar fashion, Miguel has learned to speak in light sentences, as he would to a lover who spoke a different tongue. Theirs is a language devoid of causality: “I was the first in my family to go to college,” Miguel will say, omitting,
I'd already slashed my wrists once and hoped a dose of university liberalism could save me
. “I went to Barcelona to improve my Spanish,” he says, without,
Travel or Prozac—the only two things that could get me out of bed
. “I ran out of money, so I came home,” he tells Chad, never,
I failed in starving myself to death or catching AIDS, and I'd lost the balls for outright suicide, so I didn't know what else to do
. “Love you,” he coos, adds “honey,” but never,
Help—teach me how to be like you.

Miriam is crying. Miguel knows the sound: silence. She speaks only English. “I have to talk to you,” she says. “About the ceremony.”

Previously, she has said
wedding
. Miguel waits. He knows what she will say. Though it has not been made official, she will confirm that Mami and Carlos will not attend—cannot—although they love him and think Chad a nice boy. Mami will pray for him; he is welcome for dinner anytime, and Chad, too. She will not turn her back.

“I can't be the Matron of Honor,” Miriam says like she is reading from Mami's script, poking fun at someone else's role. “This is the hardest decision I've ever made,” she says. “You know I love you,” she says, “but my children—”

“We're calling it Best Woman.” Miguel is, uncontrollably, smiling.

“I just can't support something I don't believe God supports—not in public. I can't act like the union is binding in the eyes of God. I don't know what I think you should do, Miguel. I'm not saying the right thing would be to marry a woman if you just can't love her that way. I know you were born like—I believe God made you the way you are. But He gives people tests, like some people are born without a leg or without sight, to see how you'll handle adversity. You could still choose not to give in to the limitations you were born with, not to take the easy way out.”

“What,” he says, “are you talking about? Did Mami put you up to this?”

“Mami's God is meetings and potlucks; she doesn't know what she even believes.” Miriam pauses, snuffling. “Mami doesn't know I'm talking to you, right? Her religion is about finding a new man who doesn't drink liquor, you know? I don't go to her church anymore. I don't want my girls growing up like we did. I've been taking them to Eastern Orthodox church for a few—I
feel
it there, what I've been looking for.”

Two weeks till the big night. Miguel and Chad and X and the boys have been on their knees scrubbing the mildewy Uptown theater until the mildew gleams. “Being Baptist wasn't restrictive enough for you?” Miguel asks incredulously. “I mean, they wouldn't want you to be Best Woman, either—they think I'm burning in hell, too. You don't have to change religions to get out of standing up at my wedding.”

“That kind of thinking,” Miriam says, “is exactly what I'm talking about. You know, the world does not revolve around individuals. Mami married a Baptist, so bam, she became one—you feel attracted to men, or whatever, so you think you can marry one like a man and a woman marry. Everyone does whatever they want. Papi did whatever he wanted, and he had bastard children running around Caracas and us with bruises starving to death while he partied. The Orthodox Church and its rituals have been around a long, long time—it's not about what we want. It's about what
is
.”

“Maybe what
is
is just you wanting morality prescribed in clear, unchanging terms,” Miguel says. “Maybe traditional ethics is about cowards not having to choose.”

“You can't change good and evil by changing your opinion, Miguel!” Miriam shouts, agitated. “Christ has taught us the difference, and if you found him in your heart, you'd know what I'm saying is true. I'm not denouncing you or Chad as people. I love you both as children of God, and I'll always stand by you and hope you find your way.”

“You'll always stand by me unless I ask you to stand
next
to me on the most important day of my life?” Why is he doing this? He hears himself: rhetoric, like hers.

“This is useless.” Her tears have noise now, the sound of a common cold, Miriam's voice a nasal congestion commercial. “I should never have agreed to support something I didn't believe in—I'm still new to the church, and I was hoping to have my cake and eat it, too. I didn't want to sacrifice. But I've spoken with my priest, and I know now that I can't make exceptions just because I love you—”

“God forbid anyone make exceptions for love.” He is at it again.

Miriam's voice is somber. “God
does
forbid it, Miguel.”

He is stunned. So this is it; his sister has joined the ranks of the earnest; the humor has been sucked from her pores by a vampire more powerful than their father ever was. Nothing left to say. Miguel remembers—he has occasional flashbacks of college, like a recurring acid trip—Kohlberg's morality scale, in which lower moral beings slavishly adhere to the dogma of church or state, while those at the highest level—six—are able to use rational thought to deduce morality based on the complex nuances of individual situations, even if the “right” choice defies societal norms. At the dial tone in his ear, Miguel wonders if a union between two men is more or less morally right when based on the kind of compromises mainstream heterosexual marriage also extols. Would marrying Tomas for hysterical lust, for example, have been more meritorious? Or is marrying Chad—with whom he owns a house they will be paying off for fifty years, with whom he tends a litter of bulldog pups whose butts need wiping in the middle of the night, with whom watching
The Simpsons
at 10:00 PM is a far more regular ritual than sex—exactly the kind of circumstance that will, someday in the future, convince the religious right that gay love is not so different after all? If he'd said to his sister,
We don't even have anal sex—Chad guards his anus like Buckingham Palace
, would that have made a dent? If he had said,
I thought about killing myself for years, and only this man with his lightness and entitlement and oblivion has pulled me out of the depths of my own narcissistic despair
, would Miriam consider the sin of suicide greater or lesser than that of loving a man? If he had confessed,
I'm not sure I even
am
in love with him—I'm not sure he's anything more than a survival tactic
, would she take pity? Would she ask then, as he has asked himself a million times:
If you are willing to incur the wrath of God and the world for your homosexuality, shouldn't it be for something
more?

“I've seen these beautiful sprigs of tall grass at Neiman's,” Elaine Please says into the answering machine. “Perfect for the centerpieces of the tables. I'll pick them up for you. I've spoken to Deanna about it, and she thinks it's a wonderful, charming—”
Beep
.