Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (22 page)

But I never did hang out with Ricky again.

In the first four years after the Ricky D’Angelo incident, I stayed away from messing around with other boys, only occasionally straying when I was feeling particularly lonely and horny. This self-imposed abstention from boys wasn’t always terrible for me; I was also occasionally attracted to girls, just not as often, and not always as intensely. But I did have a couple of girlfriends during my senior year of high school, and when I was with them I didn’t feel like I was sublimating some part of myself or hiding from my true nature. For the most part, I enjoyed the physical aspect of fooling around with girls as much as with boys.

But when I got to NYU in the fall of ’89 to study film, I found a fast and emphatic friend in a fellow freshman named Keith. We spent almost all of our downtime together, bonding through long, rolling conversations about the movies and actors and plays and books we loved, talking intimately about our families and dreams and hopes and fears. It gradually dawned on me that we had been sort of falling in love with each other, as much as two eighteen-year-olds could, anyway. So we started to sleep together, and then we started to really go out with each other, even telling our friends about our burgeoning relationship. Keith became my first real boyfriend. And one night I decided I wanted to call Mom to tell her about him.

Mom and I chatted for a few minutes about our latest news, about the family goings-on, about school, all the while my chest feeling more constricted than usual, my voice feeling remote from my body, until I finally worked up the nerve to say, “Mom, there’s something I want to tell you, and I don’t want you to be upset.”

Her voice got very quiet. “What is it?”

“I’m bisexual,” I said. It seemed like the best way to say it, and it wasn’t wholly inaccurate considering I’d had a sexual and romantic history with both boys and girls; I resisted limiting myself to one gender preference.

There was a long pause. I held my breath and listened to Mom’s silence.

“How can you be sure?” she finally said.

“Well, I’ve been kind of going out with a guy. His name is Keith. We love each other.” I held my breath again and listened for Mom’s next words, whatever they would be. I pictured her moving around the kitchen, cleaning, as she always did while she talked on the phone.

“I can understand that two men can really think that they love each other,” Mom said carefully. “But why can’t you just be friends?”

“Because we don’t want to just be friends,” I said, my voice rising. I was trying to stay focused, trying to remain calm, but it was a struggle. “We love each other.”

“Oh, Tonio,” Mom said. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t know what there is to understand.”

“Well…” Mom said, her voice trailing off. “I just worry about you.”

“I’m not going to get AIDS, Mom,” I said. I could feel my old, angry self-righteousness coming back to the foreground, in spite of my efforts to stuff it down and away.

“You’d better not,” Mom said.

“I won’t. I promise. I won’t.”

“You’re so
young,”
Mom said, her voice resigned. “How can you know what you want to be?”

“I know I’m young, but I do know how I feel. And I’m careful. I don’t want to get AIDS.”

“Oh, Tonio, you’d better not get AIDS…” She trailed off again. I could hear water running. She was probably wiping down the kitchen counters now.

“Well, I just wanted to tell you about Keith,” I said. “Because it’s important to me to share my life with you.”

“Okay,” Mom said, sounding deeply tired.

“I’ll talk to you later,” I said then, stifling a sigh. “I love you.” But I didn’t feel it so much as say it.

“All right. I love you, too.”

I hung up. The call hadn’t been disastrous, but it had hardly been what I’d hoped for. I couldn’t understand why she was so worried. She knew what good care I took of my body, how healthy I was. She knew I was smart and awake and alive. She had trusted me so much my whole life, giving me opportunities and freedoms other kids only dreamed about. I wanted her to trust me now.

The next family member to find out about Keith was Adam. When my brother flew to New York for a visit during his senior year in college, I hadn’t yet told him about my relationship with Keith or anything about my sexuality. Adam stayed with Keith and me for a week in our one-bedroom apartment in the East Village, sleeping on the living room couch while Keith and I stayed in our bedroom.

One night, Keith and I were kissing under the covers, Keith on top of me, when the door opened.

“Anthony?” Adam said. Keith and I froze, and I looked up to see my brother’s tall body in the door frame. He stood there for a moment, not saying anything more, and Keith and I didn’t move, as alert and still as birds, until finally Adam said, “Sorry,” and closed the door. Keith and I stayed still for another long moment, and then resumed our kissing.

The next day, Adam didn’t say anything about what he’d seen. I didn’t bring it up, until that night, when we were walking together on Avenue A.

“Keith and I are together,” I said.

Adam didn’t look at me. “Whatever,” he said. We walked a few more feet in silence, my eyes cast down to the sidewalk, and then Adam said, “I don’t get it, I don’t get how you can do that, but whatever.” And neither of us said any more after that.

For the rest of his stay, we didn’t talk about the incident again. Adam, who’d become a prolific writer at college, started to spend most of his time in the apartment, furiously working on a new short story. It was about a senior in college from the Midwest who comes to New York to visit his younger brother, only to walk in on his younger brother having sex with a man. Adam showed me the beginnings of the story. I liked it, and asked him if I could write it with him. He said yes, and among the scenes I wrote was a dramatic, intense confrontation between the two brothers, in which the younger brother demands to be heard by his older brother, demands to be accepted. Adam and I went back and forth like this, writing our respective scenes, neither of us acknowledging that we were writing about ourselves. As had so often been the case in our family, we avoided directly confronting each other, but for the first time we had a new outlet through which we could express ourselves. But even as we wrote, we absurdly never admitted to each other that we were working out all of our issues through our story. Not that all of those issues actually got worked out, however; in both the story and in real life, the older brother left New York without coming to terms with what he’d learned about his younger brother’s life.

Keith and I continued together for just over a year, although as time went on we began to fight, and I became less and less comfortable with the idea of having him as a boyfriend.

After my initial conversation about Keith with Mom, I didn’t mention him again to her until several months later, when she came into town for the Broadway opening night of
Six Degrees of Separation.

I called her at her hotel. “I want you to meet Keith,” I said.

“Well, I want to meet him,” Mom said, but I sensed the tightness in her voice as she spoke. She did meet him, spending a brief and tense visit with us in our apartment, sitting quietly on our desk chair, her arms loosely folded across her lap, her legs crossed, her meek voice barely reaching across the room. Keith’s energy was generally high and nervous, and her presence that afternoon seemed to wind him even tighter than normal. His eyes darted around the room at twice their usual rate, and his hands fidgeted crazily with a pen, flipping it up and down, up and down, again and again, almost faster than the eye could follow. I found myself sinking down into the couch, feeling extremely monosyllabic, conscious of the slightest change of expression on Mom’s clouded-over and mostly blank face. Later, when I asked her what she thought of Keith, she said, quietly, not looking at me, “Oh, he’s very nice.” And we didn’t speak about him again for the rest of the trip.

A few months later, Keith and I broke up, and soon afterwards I began to see David. David was an actor who was taking time off from show business to work as the AIDS Walk New York team coordinator. I was the AIDS Walk team leader of the
Six Degrees of Separation
team, so David and I had to talk on the phone a lot, and I immediately warmed to his bright, charming sense of humor and his passion for his work. I asked him out, and he said yes, and we started spending a lot of time together.

In the meantime, Adam moved to New York and into my apartment, sleeping on the sofa in the living room. He and I hadn’t spoken again about the whole sexuality issue, either negatively or positively, but I resisted sharing with Adam my relationship with David. Instead, I invited David over more and more often, and he would usually spend the night, which Adam didn’t seem to mind, and after a couple of months Adam said to David, “Hey, I think you should move in.”

I was shocked. “Really?” I said.

“Yeah,” Adam said. “It would help out with the rent, and we all get along. It’d be nice.”

“That sounds great,” David said.

And even though Adam hadn’t said so, I knew that he had accepted me after all, for which I was deeply grateful.

Even though Adam had accepted me, I still longed for a sense of peace with Mom. I would call her up and talk to her about my life, sneaking in a tidbit here and there about my relationship with David, and, when his name came up, she’d pretend it didn’t bother her. But I’d always hear a rigidity, a resignation, in her voice.

Then, on Thanksgiving in 1992, a month after my twenty-first birthday, I wrote Mom a seven-page, urgent, handwritten letter: