Instinctively, my thumb moved inside my palm to feel the titanium band around my left ring finger. Married. Yes, I supposed I was, even if California had yet to consider what Frank and I had done in Canada legal. But what did “married” mean, anyway—especially here, on this green night in the middle of the desert? What did it mean after twenty years—the last four of which had been a string of silent nights, the only sound the tapping of our computer keys, our faces bathed in the blue light of our monitors, each of us waiting for the other to call it a night so that the last one of us awake might be free to jack off, to find some fleeting, puny satisfaction with the boys of online porn?
I looked back over at the bar. All I could see was the top of his head. His thick, dark hair, the sharply cut sideburns. How very much I wanted to see his eyes.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Randall said. “I should have defined my relationship with Ike the way you’ve defined yours with Frank. You can’t lose someone if that’s simply not part of the play-book. That’s why you and Frank have held on all these years, despite all the boys who’ve come between you.” He knocked back the last of his martini. “How very nice for you.”
I smiled, eyes still averted. “Bitter doesn’t become you, Randall.”
“I’m not bitter.”
That was debatable. Randall had always had big dreams, though they weren’t anything like my big dreams. My dreams had always been about success; Randall’s were about contentment. Once, just starting out in med school, he’d imagined he’d be a great surgeon; he’d ended up as a kids’ orthodontist in Century City. Once, when we were young, he’d dreamed of finding a husband with whom he’d grow old. But the only thing that had happened was that Randall himself had grown old.
“I could never have been like you and Frank,” he was saying, shaking his head, as if he were reading my mind. “I could never have let Ike sleep around.”
I shrugged and finished my vodka.
Once, I had been in love with Randall. We had both been twenty years old—slightly more than half our current ages. We’d been living in West Hollywood, in those exciting months when it first broke away from Los Angeles to become its own city—the first gay city in the world, we liked to say. It was difficult for me to remember the way Randall had looked back then. The eyes were the same, round like buttons and as blue as an August sky. But the glorious black hair had receded over the passing years, and the belly, once trim, had grown thick. I tried to picture him as he was, but I couldn’t.
Not that it surprised me. So little of my months in California before Frank remained in my memory. All I could remember now with any real clarity were the Big Weenie hot-dog stands (BIG WEENIES TASTE BETTER) and the NO FAGS sign posted at Barney’s Beanery. And the clubs. I remembered more about the clubs than anything else: the smell of piss and beer, the silver strobe lights, the music (Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper, Yes). I think my strongest memory of those days was doing lines of coke behind the bar as “Owner of a Lonely Heart” played on the sound system.
But not much else remained in my brain from the time before Frank. I’d been a scared, insecure kid just off the bus. I’d lived with Randall in an apartment near Fairfax. I remembered a claw-foot bathtub, a ratty old couch, VHS tapes stacked against the wall almost to the ceiling. There’d been sex, a lot of sex, even though the plague was all around us then: sex with Randall, sex with Edgar, sex with Benny, sex with tons of others, usually on my waterbed, which one time sprang a leak.
But what could never fade from my memory of that time was the ambition, so tightly wound up inside me that it sometimes woke me in the middle of the night, bolting me upright, my hands clenched at my sides, causing me to scream out loud, waking the neighbors. I had traveled all the way across the country on a Peter Pan bus in order to be someone. I had failed back home, failed miserably, and so I had come west, like so many had before me. To be someone. And so I did—I became someone on top of a box in a club on Santa Monica Boulevard, wearing a pair of cowboy boots and a yellow thong, twisting my ass to Boy George and “Karma Chameleon.”
Oh, yes. A very long time ago.
On nights that were never green.
“I thought it would be me who found the lasting relationship,” Randall was saying, his voice low, his words beginning to slur from the vodka. “I thought it would be me who ended up living happily ever after—not you, Danny. You were always so flighty. Always moving from one boy to the next.”
I lowered my gaze at him. “You’ll find someone, Randall. You’ll forget Ike, and you’ll fall in love again. With someone who is worthy of you this time. Ike never was.”
This mellowed him a bit. “I’m just not sure how many more times I can go through it.” He looked so sad standing there. So sad and so old. “Falling in love is hell,” he said.
“You’re crazy. Everyone wants to be in love.”
“Oh, sure, in the beginning.” Randall drew up his chin and looked defiantly at me with his blue eyes. “It’s great to be in love in the beginning—when you’re giddy and lovesick, and you think about the person all the time, and he thinks about you. You call each other nine, ten times a day. You wish you could be together all the time. You start to miss him even before you say good night. It’s the most thrilling feeling in the world, being in love.” He paused for dramatic effect. “In the beginning.”
I laughed. “What you need is to get laid tonight.”
Randall scowled. “Oh, let’s just get out of here and have some dinner.”
“I’m not hungry,” I lied.
“Well, we’ve got to eat.”
“Who says?”
Randall was looking past me, into the crowd. I followed his gaze. A slim, blond young man in blue jeans and a vintage Atari T-shirt.
“He’s cute,” I said.
Randall’s scowl only deepened. “Well, then it’s your lucky night, Danny, because he’s been looking at you ever since we got here.”
“How do you know that? Maybe he’s been looking at you.”
Randall narrowed his eyes at me. “No, Danny. Let me give you a visual. Me, chubby and balding. You, muscles and a full head of hair. Need I say more?”
“You’re too hard on yourself, Randall.”
“He’s just a kid, anyway,” he said, shrugging. “Why would he look at old men like us?”
I laughed. “You forget that in Palm Springs, even turning forty-one still qualifies us as chicken.” I gestured with my drink. “Look around you.”
The place was, as usual, packed with fifty- to seventy-somethings. Distinguished-looking men mostly, men who had once been handsome, men who even now retained some awareness of how they should look, even if they were largely held together by buttons and cinched belts and oversize Tommy Bahama floral-print shirts. A noticeable few displayed the plumped lips and shiny foreheads of cosmetic surgery. But the ones who stood out most were the heirs of Liberace, scattered randomly throughout the crowd, wearing red velvet blazers and too much sweet cologne.
“Go ahead,” I urged Randall. “Go make a move on blondie over there.”
“Oh, please. He wants you, Danny. Don’t you want a birthday fuck?”
I leveled my eyes at him. “For your information, I had already planned on going home to Frank tonight.”
“Oh, really? And will there be a trick waiting to sleep between you?”
“Tonight, my friend,” I told him, “it will be you who goes home with the trick.”
I took hold of Randall’s arm and