When the cop saw me getting out of bed over and over again to check my phone, he started frisking me when I came inside and making me leave it in my pickup, parked at the curb in front of his house. He got out a legal pad and we sat down at his kitchen table together to make a list of excuses I could use if I returned to the cab of my truck and found that I had missed calls.
First, we made a list of the people most likely to call and ask, “Where were you?” or “Why didn’t you pick up?” Then we mapped out a list of people those people didn’t know, but who I also knew. That was excuse number one. “I was on the phone with X. S/he’s having a rough time because of some personal stuff.” Since they didn’t know one another but did know of one another, they’d never have an opportunity to test the alibi.
Then we had to come up with an excuse explaining where I was in case someone needed me urgently. I’d have to explain that I was an hour away. We agreed that no matter how pressing the issue, I would wait until I was within half an hour of my home to call.
“In fact, don’t even check your messages until you’re within a half hour of your house,” he said.
We came up with a list of locations around town that could reasonably be half an hour from my house. There were lots of places from which I might have had a hankering for ice cream or a particularly good cheeseburger. Then, if I had to call, I could say, “I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” which would raise far fewer suspicions than an hour.
I could also say I was out for a drive. I really did go for drives to unwind in those days. Gasoline was so cheap then that going for a relaxing drive seemed like a free activity.
At the bottom of the page, the cop wrote, “I’m out for a drive.”
“Don’t you get tired of this stuff?” he said, when we were finished. “I do.”
“I mean, of course I do. On one hand. But on the other hand, it’s nice that you’re my secret. It’s nice having a secret.”
“You’ll see,” he said. “It gets old eventually.”
He’d said it before, that he was sick of all the secrecy. That he didn’t like lying to people. That he was basically an honest guy with ideals and all that. I knew he’d never come out to anyone though. His stepfather? With that backyard shed for woodworking, and those horrible racist jokes? No way.
But then he did, for the kid. Or at least he had come out to some people. He told me about it on the phone, how he told his sister. How he told a guy he knew at the restaurant where he had sometimes worked security during big events. He told me his mother said she was glad he had a new roommate, and that he should try to be happy however he could because life was short, but that his grandmother, who would only be with them for a short time longer, didn’t need to know every detail, and that sometimes ignorance was bliss. He took the kid to family dinners calling him his roommate. And the kid had friends over to the house. They played video games and drank margaritas from the margarita machine the cop had bought, and they all laughed so hard someone had to run to the bathroom to pee, like girls at a sleepover.
The day we wrote the list, the cop stopped me before I could walk out the door.
“Don’t forget your excuses,” he said.
He went to the table and tore the top leaf off the pad and brought it to me.
“I can’t take this with me,” I said. “What if someone finds it?”
“Right,” he said.
He opened the drawer in his kitchen where he kept all his manuals and warranties. He put the paper under the stack there and said, “This will always be here when we need it.”
Then he kissed me and sent me home.
I liked to imagine what would happen if I got into an accident on the way home from his house or on the way to it. I hoped it would be a gruesome scene and that I would die tragically. No one would know what I had been doing there an hour from my place in the middle of nowhere. It wouldn’t make sense, and no one would know how to figure it out. No one knew the truth about where I was going except for me and the cop. Maybe he would show up at the funeral and everyone would wonder what it meant, what any of my life had meant. Or maybe he wouldn’t know, would never hear, and would think I had simply disappeared. He would be heartbroken and remember me forever as a mysterious and wonderful thing in his life.
I didn’t know why I suddenly felt I had to drive out to his house. It was important to prove to myself that I could get there without directions. That it was ingrained in my mind. I really did know. I could locate it with no problem in that sea of houses that all looked basically the same. This exit off the highway, take a right over the freeway, the road dead ends next to Noah’s Ark Self-Storage and a barbecue joint called Adam’s Rib, a right, the second right, wind around through the neighborhood, but stay on that street, and at the very last right before the road ended, there he was.
Anything could happen once I got there. Maybe I’d know just what to do at the critical moment. Maybe I’d abandon my still-running truck at the curb, with the driver’s door open as I marched to the door and pounded with my fist. What then? I didn’t know. But those were the kinds of bold moves I had read about and seen in movies that won people back, that made people think twice about all the passion they were abandoning if they were really saying no to this person.
I thought maybe I would see them, the cop and the kid, like in a film. I’d be parked on the corner or directly across the street, but they wouldn’t notice me. Through the windshield, I’d glimpse their perfect life as they loaded the car for a picnic. Or maybe one of them would be leaving for work and the other would rush out with the forgotten lunch pail and a front yard kiss.
I could crack the house open like a dollhouse and see inside all the rooms, thanks to my familiarity with the place and all the photos they were emailing to one another or linking to in private galleries to which I held the passwords.
When I arrived at his house, I didn’t think. I got out of my truck and strode to the door. I knocked and waited, feeling as though someone else was steering me, feeling that I had some right to be there. It was my list of excuses somewhere in that kitchen drawer. The kid had no right to them.
I knocked one more time. No answer. I got back into my truck and drove away, replaying the event in my mind, amazed that I’d summoned the courage to do it. I had no idea what would happen next or what else I was capable of.
38
JACK AND JOAN INSISTED ON TAKING ME TO LUNCH. I DIDN’T want to go. I felt obligated because everyone was worried about me, and I was starting to fear that my friends would stage some sort of intervention or appear at my doorstep unannounced. Or, worse, show up at the motel. I hadn’t seen Jack and Joan since a month earlier, when over the course of a frantic tour of my friends’ homes I had enacted the same breakdown in living rooms all over the city, bursting into tears then blurting out everything about the cop and the kid and my own uncertainty about everything, including whether or not I should go on living.
I told them I had lost my mind and that my only remaining connections to the cop were our sporadic, unsatisfying phone calls. I even confessed reading his email “once or twice.” I told them that I was doing everything I could to get him back, but that I hadn’t made any progress at all. In my mania, through tears, I even tried soliciting their advice, but they were all too shocked by the sudden revelation of my homosexuality and a secret romance to help me strategize. And besides they’d never met the guy and had no idea what might work.
It seemed to me in those moments that even if they had met him, my friends would never really understand. They were all so normal in the end. I couldn’t expect them to grasp passionate secrets kept for years and the kind of love that wasn’t cause for celebration but made one’s own father say things like, “I always knew there was something wrong with you, I just hoped it wasn’t this.”