“What is going on with you?” Jackie implored. At this point she was amused. It was indeed funny, until we sat on top of a picnic table in an empty part of the park and I read her the journal entry that I’d written on the plane home.
My voice shook, and she cried as I read.
“I feel awful,” she sobbed. “I feel like I hurt you when we were growing up.” In the journal, I had mentioned her haunting prophecy, but I reassured her that I didn’t blame her for anything she said. “What about AIDS? How are you going to protect yourself?” She was really worried, and said that was part of the reason she was crying.
“I’m worried, too,” I told her. “But I’ll always be safe. I won’t get it.” I wished I believed it. I didn’t. I thought for sure, one hundred percent, without a doubt I was going to get it, but I didn’t want to let on just how scared I was. I made her promise not to tell anybody. I wanted to be the one who delivered this news, and I was fiercely proprietary about how that happened. She hugged me and gave me every reassurance of support.
A couple days later I typed a letter to Amanda’s boyfriend, Paul, who was still in England, and carelessly left it on the couch in the den. Or was it careless? I knew full well that my mom watched the CBS Evening News every night with a scotch, without fail, at 5:30, on the couch in the den. She read the letter, which detailed my confession, Jackie’s response, and, for good measure, my all-consuming horniness.
“You might want to remove your LETTER from the DEN,” she said as nonchalantly (but still loudly) as she could before dinner. I panicked about what the next few hours would bring, but everything was subdued and sedate—very The Ice Storm.
Dad came home and we sat down to dinner as usual. I pushed my tuna casserole around my plate like a little kid trying make it look like he’s eating something, then I excused myself and went directly to my room to sit on my bed and wait for something, anything, to happen. Then, my parents did something they had never done before: They went to their room, closed the door, and spoke in hushed voices. Hushed voices were as rare as crucifixes at 7710 West Biltmore Drive. We were Jews who shouted across the dinner table. We didn’t whisper behind closed doors. This was serious.
My father left to play tennis (it was Wednesday, his tennis night—the show must go on), and I called Jackie from my bedroom to tell her that big stuff was about to go down.
Then I sat on my bed and waited some more.
Finally, my mother came in and sat on the rocking chair across from me. The whole situation was so loaded and obvious; we could have been a Semitic version of Tad and Ruth Martin from All My Children. “I’m ready to talk if you’re ready for that to happen,” she said.
I looked at her and said that I wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what I had to say. My voice cracked. She quietly stared at me and said, “Say what you need to say. Say the words out loud.”
I sat there staring at her. Finally, “I’m gay.”
She began crying. We both did. We discussed how long I had known, and if I was sure about it. She moved over to my bed, and we hugged and cried. She had been suspecting for several years, she admitted. Well, she had suspected a tiny bit when I was a little boy who liked to go to neighbors’ houses to sweep their floors. As for the pink I Love Lucy book? “I wasn’t so much worried that you were GAY, but that you were an AIRHEAD,” she told me. But then she really suspected when she found a Honcho magazine under my bed. (Apparently she told her shrink when this happened, and her shrink told her to stay out of my room forever—going under my bed would be like an alcoholic going to a bar.)
We talked about AIDS. We talked about telling other people, about telling Dave. We agreed he wasn’t ready to hear. We talked about how Dad would react, and she told me that even though she’d been saying to him for years: “What are you going do when our son comes home and tells us he’s gay?” and even though they talked about today being that day before he’d left to play tennis, we knew he would still probably somehow repress it.
“I probably would have hated your wife anyway,” she announced. And then we were laughing. Tension broken.
“How will you study when you get back to school?” she implored.
“What do you mean?” I said.
She said, “How will you STUDY, knowing this?”
I said, “I’ve known it all my life and studied in the past.” Well, sometimes.
We talked for two hours. Then we heard the garage door opening. My dad was home. By the time Dad walked into the room, we were slaphappy.
“Sit down,” I said.
“I was going to go eat an orange,” he said.
“Go ahead,” I said. “We’ll be right here.”
“SEE?!?” my mom mock-whispered, in full voice. “I TOLD YOU he’d repress it.”
He returned, and I told him to sit down. He said he’d rather stand.
“I’m gay,” I said.
He sat down. And took a deep breath. He muttered “shit” and “Jesus.”
I told him it was no fault of his. He said he knew that. He asked me how long I’d known, who else knew, and if there was one particular guy I was seeing. The conversation then turned—I am not kidding—to a list of hypothetical scenarios in which girlfriends of mine entered the room naked, and whether I would get
