Come Down: I.4

It was nearly the end of class, the discussion about boy actors and perceptions of homosexuality and whether the Elizabethans would have performed stage kisses or real kisses having gotten going in earnest shortly after Kat and I got off the stage, by the time Élouan finally circled back to Harris’ initial question.

“We’re almost out of time, but I do want to hear from the two of you, embodying that scene,” Élouan said, angling their chin first toward Kat and then toward me. “How did having the ‘one kiss’ line change it for you?”

“It was sweet,” Kat said. “It made it so that ‘farewell’ wasn’t the last thing we said to each other. That line was. Or actually, the kiss was.”

Élouan nodded, then turned to me with an expectant look.

“I actually didn’t think about that,” I said. “But I do like it as an interpretation.”

“What were you thinking about?”

Although it had been hours, my jaw seemed to tighten again with the punch of the Sour Patch Kids. I licked my lips. “Whoever said anticipation earlier, that’s what was on my mind. The ‘one kiss’ line puts off Romeo leaving a little longer, but it also puts off the kiss itself a little longer.”

“And why is that important?” They were leaning forward again, electric, elastic, poised to strike. I didn’t know the answer. I wanted to know the answer. I wanted them to hear the answer in my voice and say yes, yes exactly, yes you’re so right, yes, yes, yes.

“Because,” I said, hardly hearing the words come out of my mouth, just watching Élouan watch me, checking for any sign that I was telling them what they wanted to hear. “Because getting what you want is all well and good, but being just about to get what you want is the best feeling in the world.”

And Élouan let us go with reminders of the next week’s readings and thanks for being so great in their first-ever class, and Kat and I yammered at each other all the way up the stairs and out the door about how cool the new professor was, and I walked to the train and wondered why they had touched Kat and not me, and when I went to bed I laid in the dark half-dozing to visions of myself as Élouan watching me in class, and visions of myself as myself feeling Élouan’s hand on my shoulder, and visions of Élouan’s hands in other places, and visions of my hands covered in greyscale tattoos, until I finally fell asleep, but first, before any of it, right when I finished answering their question, that lovely baritone bent the world towards Élouan’s mouth as they nodded slowly and said, “Interesting.”

~

I fear I’m not making it clear enough what that class was like, and I suspect you might have needed to experience the contrast between Professor Hannah Weiss and Élouan Gage in order to appreciate its starkness properly. It’s a terrible cop-out, you had to be there, and I hate to have to say it, but in this case I think you really did have to be there. You might have had to be young and transgender and living in Boston for the first time in your quarter-century’s worth of life, too. Whatever the magic of Élouan, and I do not deny that there is such a magic, they were older than me, visibly queer, and teaching a theatre class, the combination of which was more than enough to instill in me an instant, yearning crush: do I want to be with them or just become them? But I have done my best to make it so that, even though you were not there, in all that being there entailed, you can still see why things began then, with them, as they did.

Let me put it this way: it was a three-hour discussion seminar. The observations and the back-and-forth ranged from tepid to lively. I learned my classmates’ names (Harris, Jack, Haitao, Rika, Nathan, and Patrick -- and Kat, of course). Élouan gently guided the discussion, asking the occasional follow-up question or clarifying the meaning of some word in the text, and at the end of class they offered us all another round of candy and reminded us about our Midsummer Night’s Dream readings for the following week, but mostly they alternated between standing behind the podium and sitting on the stage, watching us talk. But, from the moment I nearly collapsed at my desk, not once in those three hours did I ever feel entirely inside my own body, entirely rooted in my own life. I spent that whole time on some kind of borderline between myself and not myself, between there and elsewhere, just about to understand the joke, never quite getting to the punchline. And the longer I spent in that in-between, the better it felt. My twisting guilt -- irrational, certainly, but painful nonetheless -- at learning of Professor Hannah Weiss’ accident was, over the course of the class, transmuted into a giddy high of accomplishment, a sugar rush, a power trip. I called, and the universe answered! I turned a wet blanket into a verdant firework! My desire for theatre was so strong that I conjured theatre itself in a barren classroom, before the eyes of half a dozen nonbelievers! Equally irrational, of course, but much more fun. And the longer I watched Élouan watch us, as riveted by their everyday self as I’d been by their Lord Darlington, the feeling grew. Sour Patch Kids notwithstanding, I only got dizzier.

Which is -- well. Interesting, isn’t it?

~

That Saturday, the first of February, was Rachel’s birthday. She, in the grand tradition of young, happily married straight women with indulgent husbands and artsy, Bohemian friends, had invited me to the Adamson-Gold apartment for pregame drinks, after which we (Rachel, Zach, and I, plus three of Rachel’s coworkers, all of whom were interchangeable, beautiful, dark-haired, endearingly bitchy nursing school students with charmingly low alcohol tolerances and no sense of self-preservation) would migrate to a gay bar in Back Bay to dance the night away. By ‘dance the night away’ I of course mean that Rachel and her coworkers would dance for an hour, maybe two, and then we would all be too tired and drunk to continue and midnight would see us on our various trains home, at least, if not in bed already. 

My Friday courier runs had kept me too busy to linger anywhere, and each time I visited the ECE library the desk was being manned by a rotating gaggle of student employees, not one of whom so much as paused their conversations when taking packages and returns off my hands, so I hadn’t seen Angus and therefore hadn’t been able to articulate aloud the marvel that was summoning Élouan Gage to one’s classroom through sheer desperation, so I spent Saturday counting down the minutes until Rachel’s coworkers would ask me what I’d been up to and I could take full advantage of their audience. Because, as long as the stories I told could be plausibly spun into Tales of the Homosexual Experience, Rachel’s coworkers were a generous and rapt crowd. Having spent college immersed in the incestuous, unshockable theatre department with Rachel and Zach as my sole connection to the majority of the population’s sensibilities, I sometimes forgot that there still existed women who dreamt of a Gay Best Friend. The coworkers were three such women. I could never remember their names (one of them, I felt certain, was Ashley, and another might have been either Madison or Madelyn, and the third I had no idea), but when I showed up to Rachel and Zach’s apartment on Saturday evening, they were already there, and we greeted each other like old friends.

“Oh my God, hiiiii,” drawled the one I believed to be Ashley, who was refilling her mason jar from a pitcher of sangria when I walked in. She deposited her jar on the kitchen island and rushed me as I shucked my coat and slush-drenched boots, nearly knocking me over with a hug and two cheek kisses. 

“Hey girlfriend,” I said, half an octave above my usual register, angling my cheeks away from her lips just enough for it to be explicable as an accident.

It was not a role I ever enjoyed, per se, but to their credit, Rachel’s coworkers made it a very easy role to play, and that counts for something. I hardly had to think about it. A salacious story or two, a barely-there lisp that I only had to keep up for as long as the girls were sober enough to notice it, and the GBF could do no wrong. Rachel and Zach, for their part, looked on this performance with fond indulgence, like parents watching an elementary school play. Though I can’t say for certain, I believe they assumed the girls and I just brought out some latent flamboyance in each other that we never had the chance to release otherwise. And, when everyone had imbibed enough that they no longer needed me to entertain them, I could slide into Zach’s favorite two-hander instead, which was ‘the only two foxes in the henhouse.’ It was, in all, a very functional system.

Ashley held me at arms’ length, then pulled me back in, saying, “You look so hot tonight.”

I did, actually -- under my gigantic nylon-and-down cocoon I had worn my best tank top (black, slightly too tight, slightly too short) and a pair of pre-transition jeans that had once been ‘boyfriend style’ and were now just style, although they still hugged my ass like womenswear is supposed to.

“Shut up, you’re the gorgeous one,” I retorted.

The other two dark heads popped up from the couch, where they sat and sipped side-by-side at a right angle to the loveseat, which held Rachel and Zach, curled into each other like cats. The armchair, as was customary, had been left empty for me.

“Is that bestie Marco?” said one of the girls on the couch.

“Oh my God, Cora, you’re like a medieval monk, I love it,” said the other. “Bestie Marco. Like it’s a title.”

“It is,” Cora insisted, slurring already, although only slightly. She would be unintelligible in another two hours and asleep in another four. “You are Bestie Maddie, and he is Bestie Marco, and that is Bestie Zach, and that is Birthday Girl Rachel!”

Cora (so she did have a name, albeit one I would forget again before the night was through) and Maddie (net zero information on that one) squealed and clinked their mason jars with Rachel’s. Finally, as if brought to her senses by the sound of glass against glass, Ashley released me and said, “We need to get some of this sangria in you.”

“Yes!” Rachel called. “Marco, catch up!”

“And get me some more too, while you’re at it, Ash,” Zach said. He was grinning at me in a way that promised bro-solidarity as soon as I wanted it. “I am way too sober to listen to noises that high-pitched all night.”

“If they go high enough, you won’t be able to hear them at all,” I told him, taking an empty jar from the cupboard and pouring myself a generous measure of sangria. “Like a dog whistle.”

Two rounds of drinks were enough to make the room and my mind go soft-focus at the edges, and I curled up in the armchair and listened to the girls banter back and forth about which of their colleagues at the hospital were superlative: creepiest, most annoying, furthest up their own asses, least considerate with the schedule. No positive superlatives were awarded. I was beginning to fear that I had arrived too late, although the train had only held me up by about twenty minutes after the time Rachel had told me to arrive, and that Ashley, et al., were already drunk enough that they didn’t need a court eunuch. This would ordinarily have come as a relief, but the tipsy fuzz at the perimeter of my thoughts had a shimmery green tone to it. I had to tell someone.

Finally, Rachel declared it time to go out, and as all of us were bundling up, Maddie steadied herself on my shoulder while slipping into her impractical heels and said, “So, Brother Marco.”

“Bestie Marco!” Cora interjected.

“Brother Bestie Marco. I have missed you. What have you been doing with yourself?”

I launched into the story at once. I had to temper it, playing to the crowd, no mention of magic, dimming the miracle of the conjuring itself to campy hyperbole. My chosen framing was of the “total bore” of a professor for my continuing education class who was, by fiendish providence, “literally hit by an actual car” and replaced by “the hottest guy I’ve ever seen in my life -- well, not a guy, they’re nonbinary” (how exotic! how novel! how very queer!).

“The hottest them you’ve ever seen!” Cora squealed. “Oh my God, do you think they party?”

“I can’t imagine they don’t,” I said, and I couldn’t. People who looked and dressed and moved through space like Élouan were made for loud music and bright lights and faces covered in glitter. Or, at the very least, for cast parties where everybody got a little champagne-drunk and, in the absence of the bravery to start a proper orgy, gave shoulder massages and laid around with their heads in each other’s laps. There were dozens of neon-headed, elfin people of indeterminate gender at the few drag shows I’d been to -- not that Élouan was elfin, per se, but I could envision them surrounded by a horde of such people, Puck among the Peaseblossoms and Cobwebs and Mustardseeds. Point being, I had no way of knowing whether or not Élouan partied, but really, how could they not?

“Wait, Cor, you’re so right,” Maddie said. “What if he’s there tonight?”

“What if they’re there,” Rachel corrected, and Maddie put a hand over her mouth, bugging out her eyes in apologetic mime.

Zach patted Maddie on the shoulder and said, “There, there,” and we all laughed harder than the joke deserved thanks to the sangria, and as we walked out the door Cora caught me by the sleeve of my puffy coat.

“I hope they come out tonight,” she said. “We can all wingman you. Wingwoman. Wingthey! Do you think they’d go to Horsie’s?”

Ay, there was the rub. If, indeed, Élouan partied, they surely did so somewhere cooler than Horsie’s. I don’t mean to discount the storied history of the place. It was the oldest continuously-operating gay bar in Boston, an honor it did not earn by opening first (it was only established in 1945, timing that allowed it to catch a wave of Navy boys returning home and missing their old subs, pun intended). Horsie’s instead held the title by a combination of tenacity and semantics. It clung on through the wave of closings that shuttered the Playland Café in the ‘90s, and while other, older venues had spent some time catering to lesbians or had recently expanded their self-conceptions to become drag bars or LGBT clubs, Horsie’s had remained stubbornly for gay men. This, of course, meant that on any given weekend there were very few gay men there. It was a tourist attraction for certain kinds of tourist (namely queers) who, for whatever reason, weren’t visiting Stonewall instead, and a place where certain kinds of local (namely straight girls in large groups celebrating birthdays and bachelorette parties) could go to feel like they were getting a drink on the wild side. Despite being ostensibly bisexual and ostensibly a man, I had only ever been there with Rachel.

We clomped through the slush, Rachel steadying herself on Zach’s arm, the trio taking turns steadying themselves on mine, as if I was any steadier than they were, until we saw the bright pink neon logo, bubble letters with a cartoon hobby-horse replacing the ‘i’ in the name. Ever since Chappell Roan broke through I doubt a single night has gone by without Horsie’s playing “Pink Pony Club” over the fuzzy sound system, and though the rumor that Horsie’s partially inspired the song is entirely unfounded and easily disproven, I still hear it repeated around town now and then. Inside, it was as it always was: fuchsia vinyl barstools and booths, sticky dark wood high-top tables, a pool table tucked away in the corner, a makeshift dance floor that was really just a bare patch close to the speakers and away from which all the furniture had been shoved, already occupied by a couple college-age boys (Northeastern, I assumed, or maybe BU), both tall and tan and floppy-haired, and a group of midthirties women in feather boas and matching silk-screened BRIDE OR DIE t-shirts.

We did a round of B-52s at the bar and then claimed a booth where the girls could toss down their coats and their empties and Zach and I could sit and sip our beers and watch the proceedings, making little heckling comments to each other like Statler and Waldorf.

“I assume Hot For Teacher isn’t one of the bachelorettes?” he asked, gesturing at the dance floor, which by then was entirely women: the college boys had decamped for the pool table.

“God, no.” I took a swig of my beer. “They’re not even that hot. They’re just…”

Zach waited, taking a swig of his own. He was good at that -- with me, at least. He and Rachel shared the load of conversation between themselves, but when it was just Zach and me he let me do most of the talking, and he knew when I wanted to be drawn out and waited in offering silence, letting me set the pace.

“They’re charismatic,” I finally said as one song faded into another, so the adjective would drop into the quiet beat in between. “I don’t think anybody’s ever commanded my attention like that. I don’t even know how I feel about them. I just know I’m obsessed.”

“Yeah, doesn’t sound like the kind of person who’d be at Horsie’s.” Zach smirked a little. “Obsessed is a strong word.”

“You know I don’t use weak words, Zachary.”

“Touché.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a darting motion, a lithe blur, and then one of the college students was shifting himself from foot to foot at the edge of our booth. The other one still stood at the pool table, a half-played game arrayed in front of him, with his elbows on the table’s wood trim and his face buried in his palms.

“Hi,” the guy at our table said, flicking his eyes to both of us before settling on Zach. “My friend thinks you’re hot and he’s too pussy to say anything about it.”

“I’ll kill you!” the other guy called across the bar, voice muffled by his hands.

Zach leaned back, his smirk softening into a gentle smile, and turned his beer bottle hand ring-side-out so his wedding band caught the lights. I had never seen Zach on the receiving end of such attentions before, but it was evident from his manner that this was not the first time it had happened.

“Tell him I’m super flattered,” he said, “but I’m tragically straight. I’m here for my wife’s birthday.”

“I told you!” the guy at our table called back to his friend. Then, to Zach, he asked, “Which one’s your wife?”

“She’s the one -- oh, boy. She’s the one hugging that lady in the tiara and sobbing. Five bucks she’s telling her how pretty she is. I’d better get in there.” Zach scooted past the messenger boy and flashed him one more kind smile. “But my boy Marco here is both bi and single, if that floats either of your boats.”

The messenger rounded on me, pulling a vape from his pocket and giving it a suck as he sized me up. “You’re cute.” He blew out. Watermelon.

“Thanks.”

He held out the vape toward me, saying, “You want?”

I shook my head. “I don’t smoke.”

“It’s a vape.”

“Let me clarify. I don’t inhale anything.”

“Suit yourself.” He glanced over at the dance floor. “You’re here with the straights?”

“Friends from college,” I explained, although hearing someone else call Rachel and Zach the straights rankled, despite or likely because of the fact that it was how I privately thought of them. “How old are you?”

“If the bartender asks? Twenty-one.”

I rolled my eyes. “And how old are you if I ask?”

“Nineteen. Twenty in May.”

“A little young for me, then, but good luck to you and your friend there.”

“What do you mean, young? Aren’t you in college?”

“I’m twenty-five. I just look young.”

“Twenty-five is basically the same.”

“It’s six years.”

“Five in May. And the gay community is, like, completely full of age gaps.”

I shrugged. “Fair point. I just have a personal rule against dating anyone who’s not old enough to drink. That said, I have no problem with you drinking. Buy you a consolation shot?”

He grinned and waved his friend over, and the three of us did another round of B-52s before they retreated back into their pool game and I allowed myself to be dragged by the wrists onto the dance floor and surrounded by Rachel and Zach and Cora and Maddie and Ashley, our bodies bouncing softly off each other as the speakers cycled through what was probably somebody’s Spotify playlist of 2000s club hits. There was a lot of Nelly.

To call it a personal rule was an exaggeration. It’s not that I lack personal rules -- the no-smoking thing was one of them -- but even in cases where I’m flexible, it’s the easiest way to get someone young and eager off my back, I’ve found: invoke the idea of a great and principled existence informed by shadowy past heartbreak, implying that I had been done wrong by, or perhaps done wrong to, one too many underage drinkers, and now I’d sworn off them forever. I have rarely had to use this gambit, however, because the young and eager ones tend to believe that they ought to be the pursued, not the pursuer, and aside from a little exploratory eye contact, I am usually quite safe from their advances. 

The messenger boy was right about the five- or ten- or twenty-year age differences that seem more common in gay relationships, from one-night stands all the way up through lifelong partnerships. I happen to know that Angus’ first husband (there has been no second husband, but Angus would like to remarry eventually, and in fact he recently floated the idea of taking me ring shopping, so first husband is his terminology of choice) was nine years his junior. The truth is that I have no qualms about these age gaps. I just prefer, given the choice, to be the young and eager one.

Also, it would have been rude to go home with a boy on Rachel’s birthday, even if it would have made her friends very happy.

Might Makes Write and all the writing shared herein are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.