CHAPTER 6

What the Coffee Costs

GARY

I have done this before. Not the reunion — the first hour. The one that started all of it. I lean back in a coffee shop that has already closed for the night and let the memory come, because it is the only company I have until she walks in, and because if I’m honest it is the memory I have been living inside of for five years.

That first night, on the other ship, it was Dee who asked me. That is the part almost nobody would believe about her now, the way she came at me later, all nerve and challenge — but that night she was nervous, plainly nervous, and she asked me to have a coffee with her the way you’d ask for something you’d already half decided you had no right to. It was nearly midnight. We came out of the casino and the coffee shop was closed, dark, the chairs already up on two of the tables and the machines wiped down for the night. There was no coffee to be had. Neither of us said the obvious thing — that with the shop shut we had no reason to stay. We just drifted to the corner, pulled two chairs down off a table, set them across from each other, and sat.

She was easy to talk to. I want to be careful with that phrase, because people say it about anyone pleasant, and this was not that. This was something I had no defense against. I am a man who has spent a lifetime deciding, very precisely, what a given person is allowed to know about me, doling it out in careful portions, keeping the good china locked in the cabinet. And within an hour of sitting down in that dark café I heard myself handing her things I had never handed anyone. Private things. I told her about the depression that had come for me not long before — the real kind, the kind with a floor that drops out from under you, the kind that had finally frightened me enough to sit in a doctor’s office and admit I needed medication to climb back up. I had told almost no one that. I told her.

I told her about my body, which is a vanity I don’t confess to men and had certainly never confessed to a woman I’d known for forty-five minutes. That it was aging on me. That the physical work I love, the kind that had always been mine, the lifting and the building and the doing, was getting harder to do, and that some mornings I felt the machine of myself starting to wind down and it scared me more than I let on to anybody. She didn’t flinch and she didn’t reassure me, which is what most people do to make themselves feel better. She just took it, the way you take a thing someone hands you because they trust you to hold it.

We talked about grief. She went first, or maybe I did — I’ve lost the order of it, only the weight. She told me about her husband. She told me about losing a grandson, a thing so far outside the natural order of the world that there is no good place to put it, and she put it on the table between us anyway. And I found myself telling her about my mother, and about my brother, and then — and I still don’t fully understand why, except that the dark and the late hour and the sheer easiness of her had taken the lock clean off the cabinet — I told her about the tattoo on my arm. I even showed her. It is not a thing I explain to people, because explaining it means explaining him, my brother, and what the two of us did together the day we got them, and what it means now that I carry mine and he is gone. I talked about the loss of him and the particular pain of it, the pain that doesn’t announce itself and then flattens you in a grocery aisle. She listened to all of it with those steady eyes, and I felt, for the first time in longer than I could name, known. Not charmed. Not entertained. Known.

Time did the thing time does when you are not guarding it. I looked up and it was two in the morning, and the barista who’d wanted to leave at midnight had given up on us entirely and was doing paperwork behind the counter, and I realized with a small cold jolt that I did not want the night to end and that this was a problem, because there was something I had not told her, and the longer I didn’t tell her the more it felt like a lie by omission, and I do not, whatever else is true about me, like to lie about that one thing.

Because I could feel it — the pull between us, the current in the air over that little table — and I had built an entire life, at great cost, on the understanding of myself as a gay man. Two marriages behind me, a son, a granddaughter, and a hard-won certainty about who I was, and here was this woman undoing the certainty just by sitting across from me being herself, and I owed her the truth before whatever this was got one inch further. So I spent a good part of that last hour trying to find the words, turning them over, rejecting them, the way you rehearse a dive off a high board you are not sure you’re going to take.

When I finally said it, I knew the instant it left my mouth that I had shocked her. I have seen a lot of faces receive a lot of news and I know shock when it crosses one. She was not disgusted and she was not unkind — there was not one flicker of judgment in her, and God knows I have watched for it on other faces and found it — but she was stunned, all the way through, and she could not hide it, not from me and not for the second and a half it took her to gather herself. And then she gathered herself beautifully. She recovered and went right on talking as though I’d told her the weather, warm and open and unbothered, giving me the gift of pretending it was no great matter. I let her give it. But I knew better. I have always known better. Something had opened in that room and both of us had felt it, and now I had put a wall through the middle of it, for honesty’s sake, and I did not know whether the honesty had saved us or ended us before we began.

At three in the morning we finally admitted we had to go — the ship put us off in three hours and neither of us had slept. We stopped at the elevator, and we hugged, the careful hug of two people who have just spent a night saying true things and are not sure what they’re allowed to be to each other now. We traded numbers. And then we went our separate ways down two different corridors, and I stood outside my cabin door with my heart going like I was twenty years old, thinking: what in God’s name was that, and what am I going to do about it.

What I did about it, of course, was run. But that comes later, and she already knows that part, and I have an hour coming in which I am finally going to have to account for it.

The café around me now is a different café on a different ship, closed and dark the same way that first one was, the chairs up, the machines wiped, a bored kid behind the counter counting the minutes until we leave. I chose it on purpose. I wanted the room to remember for both of us. And as I sit here waiting for her to walk in and start the clock, I feel the whole of that first night come back up through me — the easiness and the opening and the terror of being seen — and underneath it, exactly as fresh as it was five years ago, I feel the anxiety all over again.

 

DEE

This afternoon the café buzzed with laptops and cappuccinos and vacation plans. Now there are only stacked chairs and the hum of refrigeration, and one bored barista wiping down a machine that has already been wiped down, glancing at us the way staff do when they are counting the minutes to close and you are the reason they can’t start. The pastry case is nearly empty — two croissants and a slab of something lemon, marked down, waiting to be thrown out. The espresso smell has gone stale and slightly burnt. Somewhere a cooler cycles on and fills the silence so that neither of us has to.

I know he chose this place on purpose. He was re-enacting our first conversation in a similar café on a different ship. It’s quiet and private this time of night, as evidenced by the many private thoughts we shared that night, until 3:00am. I remember it had taken all the courage I had to ask him to have coffee and when he agreed I was very nervous. I had decided to risk it because I did not want to regret not doing it. We were having a wonderful conversation until about 2:00am he shared with me he preferred men to women. He told me that I did not look stuipid but I was more than shocked. I am not worldly in these things and I was in total shock. He had said he was previously married, had a son, was a grandfather and was no longer married. I had no idea that meant he had gotten a divorce from a second marriage to a man. It’s not that I was judgemental, its just I was completely shocked and very disappointed. I knew I had to guard again that charm, already put in full view at the casino. His smile alone makes my heart jump and his words of adoration can just make me forget anything.

He speaks first, and of course he leads with charm — as if charm were the thing I came for. It is the first thing I remember about him and the thing I have spent five years trying to reclassify as a warning.

“You are even more beautiful than five years ago.”

I let that sit on the table between us, unclaimed.

“How did you manage to choose this cruise?”

“New ship for me. Once upon a time somebody told me how to get a casino discount.” He winks, and we both know that somebody was me — I explained the whole system to him over gelato in a port I can no longer name, how the offers work, how they chase you once you’ve played, and he’d listened with his chin in his hand as though I were explaining the origins of the universe. “You were right about it, by the way. Got an offer for a cabin for two, no single supplement. I’m here alone.”

He drops that last part carefully, and watches to see where it lands. I’m here alone. As if the arithmetic of who is and isn’t with whom were any of my concern now.

“I’m here with my best friend.”

“Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

I ignore it, because I did not walk down here at closing time to give this man a summary of my life like a woman updating a college roommate. There is a question I have carried for five years and I am not leaving without asking it.

“Did you get my birthday text last week? And the four before that? I never heard back.”

“Yes.” Something crosses his face — not quite shame, adjacent to it. “That was so sweet. I can’t believe you remembered.”

“Every year.”

“I can’t believe you kept reaching out.”

“Did you want me to stop?”

“No.” He says it fast, before he can dress it up, and I think it might be the only completely honest thing he’s said since he sat down. “If I’d wanted that, I’d have blocked you.”

And there it is — the admission that he was there the whole time. Present. Reachable. Choosing, over and over, not to answer. Not lost. Not confused. Not, as I let myself imagine on the worst nights, dead in a way that would at least have been a reason. Just a man with a phone in his pocket, reading a woman’s birthday wishes and setting the phone back down.

Something in me that has been clenched for five years lets go, and what floods into the space is not relief. It is fury, clean and enormous, and underneath it, worse, a small stunned grief, because the not-knowing had been its own kind of hope and he has just taken it from me across a café table without appearing to understand that he’s done it.

“So,” he says brightly, mistaking my silence for softening. “How are you? What’s new?”

I stare at him.

“That’s where you want to start? You don’t get to pretend five years didn’t happen. You think you can smile at me and I’ll forget what it cost?”

I stand up and walk away, and I do not look back, and it is the hardest thing I have done in four years. Not because I want to stay. Because every step is a small argument with the part of me that has waited five years to be in a room with him and would rather be furious in his presence than at peace without him, and I do not like knowing that part is in there.

#

GARY

She’s gone.

The old Gary would have found a lame excuse and gone as well — would have decided, before she reached the door, that she was overreacting, that he’d been perfectly reasonable, that a man can only apologize so many times. The old Gary was a genius at being the injured party in rooms he had set on fire himself.

Instead I sit in the empty café and let it land. The barista gives up all pretense and starts stacking the last chairs around me. I don’t move. I make myself stay in the seat and feel it, the way Ted would tell me to, the way eleven years of rooms have told me to: don’t manage the feeling, don’t explain the feeling, don’t improve the feeling. Just have it.

It is not a good feeling. Good.

On the way to my cabin I pass the bar. I stop. I stand there a full minute, looking at the bottles lined up like an answer — backlit, amber and clear and green, arranged the way they arrange them everywhere in the world to look like the solution to whatever you walked in carrying. I know exactly which one I’d order. I know exactly how it would taste and exactly how the first ten minutes would feel and exactly, to the hour, how the next two years would go.

I swallow. I take a breath. I keep walking.

In my cabin I type: I’m sorry.

No response. I wait thirty minutes — I actually watch the clock do it — and try again: Please meet me for lunch and let me apologize in person.

An hour goes by. Nothing. Amends are mine to offer; acceptance is hers to give. I know that. My sponsor has said it to me in a dozen shapes and I have said it to newer men in a dozen more, and it is easy to believe about other people’s wreckage. Knowing it does not make the hour shorter.

#

DEE

“Lou, you’re not going to believe what happened.”

She sits up in bed and takes off her reading glasses, folds them onto the paperback splayed on the coverlet. Our cabin is the usual shoebox — two beds a nightstand apart, a balcony door, her clothes already colonizing three of the four drawers. She has been my roommate on eleven cruises and she claims the drawers on every one of them within an hour of boarding, and I have never once minded, and that is its own small piece of evidence about who I let take up room and who I don’t.

“The man from the cruise. Five years ago. He’s on this ship.”

“This ship.” She is fully awake now.

“He asked me for coffee and then had the nerve to pretend nothing ever happened. I walked out.”

“Good for you.”

“I wasn’t even angry at first. I was charmed. He’s intoxicating, Lou, he always was. And then he offered nothing — no reason, no apology, nothing — and I was furious.”

“You do not owe him forgiveness.”

“He never asked for it.”

She nods slowly, and I know that nod. I have been reading that nod for thirty years, since the afternoon we met — me in the chair, she behind it with a comb and a pair of shears, the mall salon loud with dryers and gossip, and Lou telling me inside of twenty minutes that she was in the middle of a divorce so ugly it had its own weather system. I told her I was in the middle of one too. Both husbands’ lawyers. Both, in a coincidence we decided could only be the universe having a laugh at our expense, named Harry. Three kids apiece. We sat there — client and hairdresser, total strangers — trading the details like two soldiers comparing wounds, and by the time I’d finished her blowout we had exchanged numbers, and we have not gone a week without speaking since.

The difference between us was the whole difference, and I have never forgotten it. Lou represented herself. Stood up in that courtroom with a legal pad and a binder she’d organized at my kitchen table, looked her Harry and his four hundred dollars an hour dead in the eye, and took him apart with nothing but preparation and nerve. I went the other way. I hired the biggest gun I could find and paid him with money I did not have, fighting a man I had personally put through law school — I typed his outlines, I waited his tables, I believed him when he said someday this pays off for both of us — and by the end of it I had my children and a mountain of debt and the particular education you get from financing your own defeat against a man who learned to litigate on your dime.

Lou decided with facts. I decided with fear, and then I paid interest on it for a decade. She has never once said so. She has never had to. She just does the nod.

My phone dings. Please meet me for lunch and let me apologize in person.

I hold it up so she can see.

Lou reads it and hands the phone back. “Now, you don’t owe him a hearing either. But five years ago you told me he avoided every difficult conversation he ever came near. So the question isn’t whether he’s sincere.”

“Then what is it?”

“Whether you still know how to protect your own heart while you find out.” She lies back down and pulls the thin cruise-line duvet up to her chin. “Decide with facts, Dee. You’ve had five years of deciding with fear.”

There it is. The same sentence, more or less, that she has been handing me in one form or another since the mall salon — since she watched me write a check I couldn’t cover to fight a battle she fought for free with a legal pad. Decide with facts. It is the whole of what she knows and the whole of what she is trying to give me, and she gives it the way she gives everything, plainly, and then turns off her lamp.

Then, in the dark, in an entirely different voice:

“Can I say one more thing and then I’ll sleep?”

“You will anyway.”

“When you told me tonight that there’d been someone — you looked happy for about a second and a half. And then you looked like you’d been caught.”

“Caught at what?”

“That,” Lou says, “is a very good question.”

She is asleep in four minutes. She has always been able to do that — set a thing down and sleep on it — and I have always envied it, the way I envy people who can leave a phone in another room. I am not asleep. I am not close.

Because here is the thing I do not say to Lou, and have not said to anyone, and am not certain I have ever admitted to myself: five years ago, when Gary went quiet, some small and shameful part of me was relieved.

I had been happy for eight months. Eight months of texting at midnight and laughing at nothing — and the whole time a voice at the back of my skull was saying this will be taken from you, it always is, and the higher you climb the further you have to fall.

And then it was taken. And the voice said: told you.

I have been listening to that voice ever since. I have been calling it wisdom. Lou would call it fear with a good vocabulary, and Lou, on the evidence of thirty years, is generally right about which is which.

Before I sleep, I text back: I’ll take the bet. 11:30, outside the main dining room. Don’t be late.

And then, because I’ve spent five years being the one who never got an answer, I add one more line.

One hour. That’s what you get. After that you’ll either lose me for good — or you’ll finally tell me the truth.

#

GARY

My phone dings at 11:47 p. m.

I read it twice. Then a third time.

One hour to explain five years. It is more than I deserve and less than I need, and I have exactly eleven hours to become the kind of man who can use it.