Read Online Where The Boys Are by William J. Mann - Free Book Online
Authors: William J. Mann
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life. Except that he needs help getting groceries and things like that, for which Eva is only too glad to volunteer. I watched her with him, and she was perfect: warm, interested, nurturing, but never condescending. She fixed his meals, kidded with him about his hair, gently massaged lotion into his feet until he drifted off to sleep. “I admit I dote on him,” she told me. “When I look at Alex, I don’t see a wasted, dying man. I see the man he was and still is: handsome, witty, talented. If he wasn’t gay, I just might well fall in love with him, virus and all.”
Eva Horner is fifty years old. She’s a widow, still grieving her husband. In her youth, I imagine, she was very pretty. Even now she’s got large brown doe eyes, strawberry blond hair, and a scattering of freckles across her cheeks that belie her half-century of life. Yet she seems to do her best to conceal her attractiveness, pulling her hair back severely in a bun, keeping her large breasts shrouded in loose, heavy sweaters or smocks. Those oversized mammaries are an anomaly: everything else about her is tiny, petite, delicate. She stands just four feet ten, with hands as small and delicate as a girl’s. She smiles easily but shyly, always with a hint of embarrassment, as if she didn’t feel she deserved to be having such a good time.
I know that I make her smile. Until meeting me, she was as adrift as I was: unsure of her next move, still trapped in her own prison of grief. Her volunteer work was a bold leap back into the world for her, a move from which I took inspiration. She doesn’t have to work: she admits that she came from money, and then her husband left her fairly well off on top of that. She lives in opulent splendor—three bedrooms upstairs, a downstairs den, a parlor and full pantry—but it was a jail cell for her nonetheless. Before I met her, I’d never known anyone in New York who had an apartment bigger than my closet in Provincetown. But her wealth never bought her happiness or a respite from her grief.
“It’s only by living that you can really live,” she said to me one night—a simple, almost banal statement, but one that made me look over at her in wonder. We’ve had many such moments like that, moments of insight that have startled me and encouraged me back on my road to wellness. “It’s only through connection with another person that one understands why we’re here,” she said another time, a truth that might have been uttered by Javitz himself.
She’s struggled with finding connection all her life. Her mother died when she was very young, and she was raised by a series of nannies. She craved the love of her distant but adoring father, a diplomat in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations who was forever flying around the world. Often months would go by before Eva would see him again. “He never failed to bring me home a beautiful doll from Japan or a dress from France,” she said. “How happy I would be to see him. As a little girl, I’d climb into his bed and stay there with him all night. The nannies always thought it wasn’t proper, but I was just so glad to see him, and he me.” His portrait hangs in her living room, a somber, gray-haired man I have a hard time imagining showing any warmth. “That’s how I picture Daddy when I think of him now,” she said. “In oils. I saw that portrait more often in my childhood than I ever saw the real man.”
Her greatest disappointment in life, she’s told me, is that she and Steven never had any children. “I guess in the old days they would have called me barren,” she said. But ultimately she thinks it was probably for the best, given the truth she discovered about the man she had married.
“You know, Eva,” I say, setting down my mug of cocoa, “I felt bad leaving you to go to the bar tonight when I realized you’d be alone. You told me you were having a gathering, that there would be other people, everybody doing past-life regressions. But it
Eva Horner is fifty years old. She’s a widow, still grieving her husband. In her youth, I imagine, she was very pretty. Even now she’s got large brown doe eyes, strawberry blond hair, and a scattering of freckles across her cheeks that belie her half-century of life. Yet she seems to do her best to conceal her attractiveness, pulling her hair back severely in a bun, keeping her large breasts shrouded in loose, heavy sweaters or smocks. Those oversized mammaries are an anomaly: everything else about her is tiny, petite, delicate. She stands just four feet ten, with hands as small and delicate as a girl’s. She smiles easily but shyly, always with a hint of embarrassment, as if she didn’t feel she deserved to be having such a good time.
I know that I make her smile. Until meeting me, she was as adrift as I was: unsure of her next move, still trapped in her own prison of grief. Her volunteer work was a bold leap back into the world for her, a move from which I took inspiration. She doesn’t have to work: she admits that she came from money, and then her husband left her fairly well off on top of that. She lives in opulent splendor—three bedrooms upstairs, a downstairs den, a parlor and full pantry—but it was a jail cell for her nonetheless. Before I met her, I’d never known anyone in New York who had an apartment bigger than my closet in Provincetown. But her wealth never bought her happiness or a respite from her grief.
“It’s only by living that you can really live,” she said to me one night—a simple, almost banal statement, but one that made me look over at her in wonder. We’ve had many such moments like that, moments of insight that have startled me and encouraged me back on my road to wellness. “It’s only through connection with another person that one understands why we’re here,” she said another time, a truth that might have been uttered by Javitz himself.
She’s struggled with finding connection all her life. Her mother died when she was very young, and she was raised by a series of nannies. She craved the love of her distant but adoring father, a diplomat in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations who was forever flying around the world. Often months would go by before Eva would see him again. “He never failed to bring me home a beautiful doll from Japan or a dress from France,” she said. “How happy I would be to see him. As a little girl, I’d climb into his bed and stay there with him all night. The nannies always thought it wasn’t proper, but I was just so glad to see him, and he me.” His portrait hangs in her living room, a somber, gray-haired man I have a hard time imagining showing any warmth. “That’s how I picture Daddy when I think of him now,” she said. “In oils. I saw that portrait more often in my childhood than I ever saw the real man.”
Her greatest disappointment in life, she’s told me, is that she and Steven never had any children. “I guess in the old days they would have called me barren,” she said. But ultimately she thinks it was probably for the best, given the truth she discovered about the man she had married.
“You know, Eva,” I say, setting down my mug of cocoa, “I felt bad leaving you to go to the bar tonight when I realized you’d be alone. You told me you were having a gathering, that there would be other people, everybody doing past-life regressions. But it
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