Let's Get Back to the Party Read online

  Plates came and went. Dani told Table Six about her math classes at Mortimer, her Arab background. I was wondering where all that beautiful skin came from, Will, one of Lee’s real estate colleagues, said. John talked politics with Will’s boyfriend, Tom. I kept quiet until Dani noticed and, with the same tone I’d heard her use around shy students, volunteered information on my behalf. Sebastian’s Arab, too, she said. Well, half. His mom’s side. You’ve got nice skin too, Will said to me. I saw John frown over his shrimp salad as if the words had been plucked from his mouth. Everyone around the table looked at me, and I realized I was expected to explain. My mother came here in the seventies for college, I said. She met my father, fell in love, stayed. Dani raised a salad fork. Seduced by the white man, she said. His mother was a lot less pious than mine. Table Six chuckled, and I felt pressured to continue. I didn’t even get an Arab name, I said. She didn’t want anything to do with that part of her. I just got the skin. And the dark hair. It’s so full, John said. Tom asked how my mom handled my sexuality. I shrugged. She doesn’t care, I said. She’s dead. Table Six went quiet. Dani frowned at me, aware of what I was trying to do, and I felt gleefully malevolent. It was a long time ago, she said to break the silence. Back in college, right, Sebastian? I took a long draught of wine. That’s right, I said. She was no model Muslim. She married a white Christian against her parents’ wishes, she never covered her hair. She smoked pot. Supposedly. She made pork chops for us once a week, which she loved and I hated. Sometimes, I’d see her drinking scotch in the living room while my father rubbed her feet. So no, I don’t think she’d have minded too much that her son sucked dick. I added the childish noun for levity, to steer Table Six away from the cloud cover of death and to turn the conversation away from me. Then Dani said, The dogs. Tell them about how your mom loved dogs. Reluctantly, I told Table Six about the dogs my late mother had sheltered in our Fairfax home from as early as I could remember. Not young dogs. Not puppies. The old and infirm. I mentioned Snoopy, the black lab frosted white with age, who padded awkwardly around the house from an irremovable tumor in his lower back. I told them about Spencer, the blind beagle a childhood friend and I would take for painfully long walks up to the elementary school. (I shot a glance across the room at Oscar, as if the story would somehow draw his gaze toward me instead of at his plate of shrimp, which he was picking at in obvious disgust.) I didn’t tell the table about Emma, the basset hound who’d been en route to a vet appointment when my mother’s vehicle had its fateful encounter with a harried early-evening driver. John asked if I ever thought about getting a senior dog. One day, I said. Maybe, I thought, I’ll name it Jake, take care of it just like I took care of him. And when it dies, I can bury it in dad’s backyard and finally be ready to start over again. Growing up with dying dogs, Will said. That’s fucked up. Tom slapped his arm. Sorry, Will said.

  Midway through a best maid’s speech, a flash of black drew my attention to Table Nine, where Oscar summoned a waiter for more wine. I remembered clearly the evening I’d once held that tender, thin limb in my grip. A minute later, Oscar pulled out his phone, smiled, and headed toward the restroom on those impossibly long legs of his, past caterers bringing out trays of beef medallions and chicken piccata. I watched him until he disappeared behind a heavy wood door, then turned to see John watching me expectantly. Sorry, I said to him. What was that?

  The grooms arrived at Table Six. They loomed over Dani, over me. My co-worker, Dani said. He teaches at Mortimer with me. Nice to meet you, the couple said. We shook hands. Hope you’re enjoying yourself, Lee said. I am, I said. There was a flash of light as the photographer took our picture, a candid shot destined for some handmade wedding album. I imagined myself immortalized behind adhesive plastic, looking dumbstruck up at Lee and Patrick. There’s Dani, Lee would say decades later. We used to be close. Not sure who that guy with her is, though. Patrick turned to grab a flitting shadow and pulled it into a hug. Oscar, he said. Glad you made it. Patrick introduced him to the table. A friend, and one of my senior graphic designers, he said. Been with us for eight years now. Nine, Oscar said, surveying the table. Hey, he said to John. Hello there, he said to Tom. Hey, he said to me. Hi, Oscar, I said. Hey, he said to Dani. I waited for Oscar to do a double take, to come back to my face. I wanted to borrow words from the grieving ghost in Hamlet (which my honors English students would be reading in the fall): Remember me. But there was no recognition I could see. Patrick plucked at Oscar’s jacket, said, You know this is a wedding, right? It was all I had, Oscar said. Lee, not hiding his displeasure at their funereal guest, tugged Patrick’s hand. Mom wants us to take a picture with Nana, he said. I watched the grooms move to where Nana, drowning in a blue tulle dress, waited patiently for what could be one of the last photographs of her life. When I turned around, Oscar was back at his table.

  The dancing began. Avoiding John’s longing look, I got up and left the reception hall, stepping out onto the back porch and into warm evening air. I watched several guests mill around the gardens, inspecting flowers, watching planes breach the clouds from their takeoffs at National. Perhaps it was the weight I’d gained in the intervening decade, the softening around my face and middle, that made me just another anonymous wedding guest instead of an old friend. For professional reasons, I avoided social media, so I had little inkling of Oscar’s public life other than what I conjured in my imagination. So what was holding me from marching back inside, from going over to Oscar’s table, tapping him on the shoulder, and telling him exactly who I was? Standing in the night, away from the party, I realized it was a fear that had already been halfway confirmed: Once again, he’d forgotten me.

  Despite the heft of its architecture, the estate couldn’t contain the music coming from inside, where the string quartet had been supplanted by the Beach Boys singing “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” I moved away from the music toward the edge of the back porch. I counted fireflies for what felt like forever until I heard someone step outside. I turned around. There he was. He was looking intently at his phone and so I walked over, stood in front of him with my arms outspread (not too wide) and said, It’s me. Oscar looked up and smiled, hesitantly. Then I saw the beautiful recognition. Wait, he said. Sebastian? Yes, I said. I pulled him into my arms and he hugged me back, delicately, the way you’d cup a chick in your palm. He smelled of sharp cologne and hair gel. I felt an emptiness as he pulled back and picked up the glass of wine he’d set down. Wow, he said. The last time I saw you was—. College, I said, committed to doing his remembering for him. The lawn party at Jefferson. Yeah, Oscar said. Yeah, that’s right. Wow. He put his phone in his pocket and picked up his drink. We clinked glasses. Nice out here, he said. I said, Isn’t it? I needed some air. And I hate dancing. Oscar smiled. I opened my mouth to ask the first of my many questions, then Oscar clutched his right thigh as if in pain. He pulled out his phone and looked at the screen. He grinned. Have to take this, he said. Okay, I said. See you back inside.

  The wedding cake was a four-tiered affair, vaguely Venetian, topped by two tuxedoed men set shoulder to shoulder. Oscar and I stood next to one another, me with a refreshed wine glass, he with his cell phone. We watched the grooms feed each other, first with their hands and then, to the ribald delight of the younger guests, mouth to mouth. Oscar groaned, tapped at his phone. Someone handed me a slice of white cake lacerated with raspberry icing. Oscar put his phone away to receive his plate of cake. He watched me take the first bite. He asked, So? It’s wedding cake, I said through the corner of my mouth. They spent more time on the outside than the inside. No, Oscar said. So how have you been? What’s new? And after ten years, all I could say in that moment, cake in my mouth, was, Good. Nothing much. Oscar asked if I was going out with the others after the reception. I didn’t know there was something going on, I said. After party for the guests, Oscar said. I think I heard it was happening at Empire. I’m sure the ladies are excited. Even Nana will be there. Oscar took an angry bite of cake and set it down on a nearby table. I asked if he was going, wondering to myself if I could tolerate the crowds and noise to spend just a little more time in his company. No, he said. Don’t think so. Been Cruzing back and forth all evening with this college kid. So fresh out of the closet he’s got mothballs sticking to his shoulders. Still, pics look promising. Here. Oscar opened up Cruze on his phone and I watched the logo—which, depending on your mood or luck, was either a carnival mask or a death’s-head—pulse purple against a gold background. Then the screen divided into the familiar series of tiled images: faces, torsos, buttocks, eyes, biceps. I imagined Jake, who’d never been able to delete the app from his phone while we were together, out on the West Coast with a small digital square of his own. The thought made me ill, so I declined to pass judgment on any pictures, turning away from Oscar’s phone and looking instead at the mass of shifting bodies on the dance floor. I saw the grooms pose for a selfie with Dani and John. I wanted all these people to disappear, one by one, until it was just Oscar and me, away from the crowds and the noise, back in the hush of my childhood basement where we’d spent so much time together. Oscar put his phone back in his pocket. So, he said, when are you going to be the main event at one of these? I drained my wine. Excuse me, I said.

  They were playing “Just Like Heaven” when I returned from the bathroom. I moved around a table of coffee-sippers and second-slice cake eaters, back to Oscar’s side, feeling like space junk pulled inexorably into the orbit of some massive dark planet. I opened my mouth to ask Oscar where he lived now, how his parents were, but he cut me off. Deal sealed, he said. Drinks at 11:30 at the Attic. Hey, you majored in English, right? I beamed with pleasure that he remembered. So this guy says he’s an English student at American. Give me the name of some books I can impress him with. I was too drained to be witty, so I said I’d have to think about it. No worries, Oscar said. You think about it and text me some titles and I’ll drop them into our conversation. We exchanged numbers with little ceremony, with no promise of meeting up.

  Dani emerged from the dance floor glazed in sweat to tell me the wedding was winding down and some people were heading over to Empire. You’re coming, right? I looked at the floor. I felt Dani looking at me. I felt Oscar looking at me. Then I said, No. No, I don’t think so. Come on, Dani said. You won’t do yourself any good going home and brooding. You do brood, Oscar said. That I definitely remember. I looked up at Oscar, thinking how a few moments ago I’d wanted to hug him and now I wanted to hit him. He just got out of a bad relationship, Dani said to Oscar. I’m trying to get him to come out and have fun. Help me out here. Oscar raised his hands in mock surrender. Staying out of this, he said. On the dance floor, couples swayed in various stages of inebriation while Nat King Cole crooned about love and sentimentality. Dani went back to find John. So, Oscar said. Single.

  We stood outside the front doors of the estate in two facing rows, me wedged between Dani and John, Oscar on his phone down at the end of the opposite row. Someone handed us sparklers. Someone else dropped small steel tins of flame intermittently along each line of guests. The whole moment, despite the revelry, despite the yawns and stumbles, had the air of a solemn sacrifice. Then they came, into the sparkling archway of light, into the warm night. Everyone cheered, yelled, hollered as the grooms ducked into a waiting car and waved goodbye.

  Inside, staff were already gathering plates, stacking chairs, unhooking paper lanterns, disassembling tables. I looked for Dani to tell her thank you and goodbye, saw her with John and several other people. Then I saw Oscar, clutching his black jacket and stealing off into the night. Without thinking, I began to follow him out of the estate and east down the cobblestone sidewalk, hardly getting closer than half a block. (Those swift legs! Even as a child, I’d had a hard time keeping up with them!) I tripped on the uneven bricks of the sidewalk and caught myself against a tree, where I watched Oscar get into a compact car with its hazards blinking. I thought about calling out to him, offering to give him a ride to the Attic, but he’d already shut the passenger door. As the car drove past, I cringed against the tree as if playing one of the games of flashlight tag that had occupied our childhood summers. Don’t see me! Please, please don’t see me! Then, once again, Oscar was gone.

  Oscar

  Fuck, I’m glad that’s over.

  I’ve got thirty minutes to meet A., who says his name is Aaron, at the Attic. Just enough time to get home, change out of this suit, clear my head, drink some water, and take a massive shit. Already, I can feel my bowels seizing in the back of this car share that smells like ginger and patchouli. These Judas gays with their undercooked shrimp on neat square toasts.

  But I did it. I suffered through the wedding and now it’s over. I’d never have shown up if my job hadn’t, in some way, depended on it. I mean, imagine what my next employee review would have been like. It’s not just that Patrick’s my boss, you see. I knew Patrick long before he sold out, back when we were just dumb twenty-somethings spending epic evenings hopping like frogs from bar to club to bar to bar to someone’s bedroom. (Or, if not someone’s bedroom, McDonald’s.) I knew him long before Lee gelded him, dragged him into the same sad life of every other boring breeder. And now? Now Patrick’s a stranger to me. Another one of the lost.

  Christ, what’s happening to us? This summer, more than ever, it seems like all the young gay men in this city are dropping like flies. It’s an epidemic, for sure. (No, not that one.) It’s been going on for months, years even. Only now, thanks to Saint Obergefell, can I see the pattern, the gravity of it all. Like an infestation. First you spot a single ant crawling on your kitchen floor, and you think nothing of it. Then you see five ants, and you begin to get annoyed. Then, finally, the entire swarm reveals itself, crawling along your baseboards and behind your trash can, and you start to feel hopeless. You start to feel like you’re the invasive species, not them.

  The stories are everywhere. I hear them doing the late-night rounds at Empire, at Curio, at Captain Dave’s. I read the announcements in the overlooked back pages of our two dueling gay rags, the Lance and the Dagger. I see the status updates on my social media feeds, get the text messages on my phone, all of them emoji’d to hell and back. I hear snippets of news reports on public radio, in breaking-news email alerts. It’s happening to celebrities and unknowns alike. Wherever I go, it’s rubbed in my face. Once, I even saw an announcement taped to a bathroom stall, papering over magic-marker cocks. Trust me: They’ll start unfurling banners from the tops of mid-rise condos and chartering private planes to spread messages in exhaust across the skies. Can you imagine?

  Some of my friends and acquaintances, admittedly, go discreetly. Others—like Patrick—depart with triumphant fanfare, like Viking corpses set out to sea on flaming biers. One week, I’m sharing an awkward hello as I pass an old hookup on Seventeenth Street or in the crowded corner of once-gay bars now packed with straight women. Then I see him less and less, until finally I don’t see him at all. Unanswered texts, unanswered emails, un-liked Facebook comments, un-loved tweets, unacknowledged selfies. Then you get the news. He’s gone. Vanished to another plane of existence, never to return. The latest one to pass up the mantle of proud queer, to leave me behind.

  Take Bart. Two years deep into a relationship with Jackson, a man I introduced him to, no less. Bart. My soldier-in-arms, my wingman. He’ll cave soon, too. Just wait. It’s only a matter of time before I’m stuffed, once again, into a church pew listening to those god-awful words, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today . . .”

  Everyone’s a victim of marriage fever now, you see. Everyone’s conforming, shacking up instead of hooking up. Everyone’s feeling, as of this warm July 11, 2015, like they’ve reached the summit of some impossible mountain.

  And here’s the worst part: Everyone’s so fucking thrilled about it all.

  A block away from Fourteenth and N, I get a message on Cruze from A.

  Hey.

  Hey, I write. See you at 11:30. Need to stop off at home.

  The car pulls up next to the bus shelter outside my apartment building.

  See? This is what I’m talking about.

  On one of the walls, inside protective plastic, is a stock image, hardly doctored, of two men (one black, one white), both handsome in that safe, demographically pleasant way, foreheads pressed together, eyes closed, scripted type compelling the viewer to make him yours forever. Below this, in the blur of the lovers’ upper bodies, is a logo for a high-end jeweler with locations in Georgetown and Chevy Chase. I can’t remember when this ad first appeared. It must have been months ago. And every time I walk out the lobby doors of the Beardsley, there it is, ready to smack me in the face. I think about the young men who pass by this bus shelter at night, on their way up into the gayborhood, longing not for fun but for the opportunity to follow in the same sluggish, knuckle-dragging footsteps of their parents and their parents before them. I think of the legions of gays to come who’ll see this ad, or another like it, and think: Yes! That’s what I want! That’s what I need! That’s what I have to have! Storybook love! Domestic bliss! Forget the beautiful grit and grime and rebellion; forget the sheer faggotry of it all. Power-wash that rust into the sewers! We want something shiny and polished! We want something tame!