“He’s black,” said M.
“And?”
“So you like black guys? Ari, you should have told me. I know lots of cute black guys. We could finally have a threesome.”
“You misunderstand me,” said Ari. Not for the first time, he thinks, but does not say aloud. “It’s not that I’m attracted to black guys per se. Or that I’m not attracted to them. I just liked him. Not his race. Him.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. We lost touch. He was just a boy I once liked in high school. That was centuries ago.”
“Ari, I love this. I’m seeing you in this whole new light. Haven’t you thought of Googling him?”
“No, I have not. That would be a violation of his privacy.”
“Oh, stop it. Don’t you ever Google yourself?”
“Whatever for? I know myself.”
“Well, I’m going to.” M whips out his smartphone.
“Please don’t. I really don’t like to do things like that. I’m not a fan of this brave new world that you’re so fond of.”
But M’s fingers are too nimble for Ari to stop him. “Uh-oh,” says M.
“What?” Ari catches his breath, feels something sink inside his chest. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“No, worse. He’s straight.”
Ari wants to throw one of his mugs at M’s head. Instead he gives a good tug at his husband’s carefully sculpted, dark wavy hair tamed with something called “product.” “Darling, please shut up.”
“Don’t you want to hear more?” asks M, using the reverse camera in his phone to pat his hair back into place.
“No.”
“You know, I found his wife. Hang on.” Tap, tap, tap on his phone. “Look, here she is. She’s cute.”
“I’m not interested.”
“She’s white. Maybe there’s hope for you, after all.”
“Okay, okay. You’ve had your little joke. Can we get back to these boxes now?”
But M would not be deterred. As Ari resumed the work of unpacking, M settled on a footrest and sporadically shouted out bits of news. For instance, after living in Michigan, North Carolina, and Boston, only a few years ago Justin and his wife settled in northern Virginia. Justin recently assumed the position of CEO of Shut Up and Kiss Me, a popular online dating app with over a million registered users. (Why this company was headquartered in non-romantic Washington of all places, Ari had no idea.)
Later, as they went to pick up pizza, M teased Ari, “Shut Up and Kiss Me, Justin!”
“Aren’t you the soul of wit,” said Ari, whose nerves were frayed from both the tedium of unpacking and the tedium of M’s teasing. His hands felt rough against the steering wheel, his skin dry from handling all that paper and those boxes. The house had been built in the late 1920s and was in dire need of a remodel, especially the kitchen and bathrooms. It was small, meant as a starter home for lovey-dovey newlyweds, rather than a bickering gay couple.
“You could send him some candy, at his office, you know? Like anonymously,” said M later at the restaurant. “Then see if he can guess that it was you.”
Ari was working on a meat lover’s supreme while M had ordered a cheese-less pizza, gluten-free. He was watching his waistline, part of his master plan to defeat the aging process. In anyone else, Ari would have written off these machinations as vanity, yet in M’s assiduous efforts to keep up with the young people, their bodies, fashions, music, slang, and above all their phones, Ari saw something like nobility, a touch of Don Quixote.
“Alright, you’ve had your joke. Can we just eat our pizza in peace?” Ari pleaded.
THROUGHOUT THE FALL, THE TEASING CONTINUED. Ari gritted his teeth, waiting for his husband to tire of the joke. Anyway, he was busy with his teaching, plus a new journal article on the shift in the language of reproductive health in the early Middle Ages. High school seemed tucked away even further back in time than the Middle Ages in his consciousness. His therapist had taught him a mantra: “I’m not a teenager anymore. I’m a grown man, and I’m safe.”
But sometimes, particularly while stuck on a knotty sentence or marking up a particularly turgid student essay mistaking Braveheart for a documentary on Medieval battle dress or battle tactics, he looked for Justin online and found him there, on the cover of Black Enterprise, or in the pages of Crain’s, Wall Street Journal, Digital Commerce, Market Watch, so many publications and websites with which Ari was unfamiliar, publications whose authors lacked PhDs and whose works did not conform to the Chicago Manual of Style. Some of the articles were accompanied by pictures of Justin, looking energetic and confident, but also, most painfully, like a full-grown man, a forty-year-old man. That other time, the one they’d shared, that was ancient history.
Finally, overwhelmed with shame at his own curiosity, Ari swatted down his laptop with a vicious click.
We were better off in a different age when we weren’t able to see these things, he thought, then vowed never to look at these things again. And he did not look at them again, until he did.
IN DECEMBER, JUST BEFORE FINALS, M stopped by Ari’s office on campus, sat on the edge of his desk, and handed him an envelope. “An early Christmas present,” he explained. Inside the envelope were two tickets to a University basketball game, on Valentine’s Day.
Because of the date, Shut Up and Kiss Me was sponsoring the game. Free hats with the website logo would be given to all in attendance and a “kiss-cam” would be installed above their heads, with a cash prize for the best kiss caught on camera, as voted upon on social media.
“Sounds gruesome,” said Ari.
“Don’t you get it?” M said. “He’ll be there. He’ll have to be. He’s the goddamn C.E.O. It’s the perfect excuse to run into him again.”
“No, no, I won’t do it.”
“But you have to, I already got the tickets.” M slid off the desk, kneeled beside Ari’s chair, ran his hands over Ari’s knees. Ari finds it odd to look down at his tall husband for a change. “Come on, have some fun for once. We need more fun in our relationship.”
“Is our present romantic life really so dreary that you have to involve yourself in my romantic past?” asked Ari, eyeing M’s hands on his body and absorbing this touch that had arrived without invitation. Its spontaneity, occurring as it did after they’d been together for two years, still caused an instinctual shriveling inside, which Ari tried to overcome. That was the whole point of being with a man like M, so comfortable with touching, feeling, grabbing, so contemptuous of personal boundaries.
Sometimes, Ari liked M’s blunt passion. It was a relief never having to make the first move, to let M take the lead when it came to sex. M brought a certain energy to his quiet existence, broke up its pleasant monotony just enough to make him feel alive.
At other times, it all became too much. Ari fantasized about telling M to fuck off—fuck, a nice old English word dating back to the Canterbury Tales and beyond. Just fuck off and leave me alone, leave me in peace, calm, safety.
ARI STILL INSISTED THAT HE WASN’T going, but M continued to badger him right through the holiday break while they were in Florida visiting Ari’s parents, who thought M was a real hoot, a charming, sparkling glass of gay champagne. The badgering continued into the New Year, and up to Martin Luther King Day when Ari relented, for reasons he still did not understand. Prurient curiosity? Nostalgia? Sexual frustration? Peer pressure? All of these and none of them. Why was he going back in time like this?
Ari considered