Read Online The Men from the Boys by William J. Mann - Free Book Online

used to play it for us in fourth grade,” I remember. “She said there was an important message to be learned there.”
    â€œWhat?” Lloyd asks. “ ‘Lower your expectations’?”
    â€œ ‘When you take you gotta give, so live and live or let go-wo-vo-wo-wo,’ ” I sing.
    â€œ ‘I beg your pardon,’ ” he chimes in.
    â€œ ‘I never promised you a rose garden,’ ” we warble together.
    We laugh. He loves that I can still make him laugh, even after all this time. “You’re such a funny Cat,” he says. “So then what happened?”
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œIn your dream.”
    â€œOh. That was it. That’s how it ended.”
    He laughs again. We sit quietly for a minute. “So,” he says finally, “did you trick while I was gone?”
    â€œOf course I did.”
    He grins. “How silly of me.”
    That’s the way it is. I trick; Lloyd has meaningful encounters. At least, that’s Javitz’s take on the whole thing. Lloyd finds the soul; I find the dick. It’s true that Lloyd doesn’t have sex with other people as often as I do in Provincetown. When he does, it lasts a week—a week I’m in Boston, of course. At the end of the week, his trick heads back to New York or Philadelphia or wherever he came from. Then there’s a series of postcards, an occasional phone call. Lloyd doesn’t understand how I can move from one trick to another in the course of a weekend. He understands less the shock of love I feel after they leave. “Why not in the moment?” he asks, but he doesn’t really want an answer, not really.
    Lloyd tends to trick with older men—men five, ten, even fifteen years older than himself. Javitz thinks it’s because it preserves his own image of himself: as boy. Lloyd says older men are more likely to be in touch with their inner spirits. Whatever. At least we don’t end up very often competing for tricks.
    He gets this far-off look in his eyes when I talk about my boys. He encourages me to talk about them, but he doesn’t say much when I do. I like to imagine that maybe, deep down, there’s a pinch of jealousy, the same tiny stab to the heart I feel when I play back a message and hear an unfamiliar male voice calling Lloyd “just to say hello.”
    â€œJealousy is no indication of love,” he has told me, and he’s right: I even used it as the first sentence of an essay I wrote for a gay magazine last year. I argued that we needed to move beyond the constraints of jealousy, that jealousy is a heterosexist trap. I theorized that by opening our relationships, we queers were teaching the world how to rethink our lives. That’s why Lloyd and I had done it, I implied: not because after two years of monogamy, our sex lives had settled into a predictable pattern and we were eager to see what else might be out there.
    It’s safe to hide behind a byline, where I can be such a pompous asshole. Because deep down inside, in my petty little jealous heart, I hate all of Lloyd’s tricks. And how I wish he’d admit to hating mine. But he doesn’t, of course, which makes me feel ridiculous for wanting him to do so, like a conventional hetero housewife, Lucy Ricardo without the laugh track.
    Lloyd’s asleep now, faceup in the sun, the earphones of his Walk-man inserted, the tiny sound of R.E.M. managing to seep through the flimsy foam rubber. I look down at him: how young he looks when his eyes are closed. How perfectly content and happy. I think about how fast six years have passed.
    I’m sweating, and I’m afraid that despite the sunblock I might be burning. Wrinkles, I tell myself: wrinkles. I can practically feel my skin creasing, shriveling up like newspaper caught by a new flame. I lay my hand on Lloyd’s shoulder, pink and hot.
    That’s when I see Eduardo.
    He’s walking towards us, deep in