Now there were the hours and hours I spent just with Kerry and especially our “date,” which I felt our dinner on Saturday amounted to. I realized that any attraction I felt towards Eileen was attraction I felt for Kerry.
I knew I was gay. I knew when I was in high school. Not that I ever acted on it. I just enjoyed the way girls, and especially not the tall, sleek distances runners with whom I spent so much time, looked. I saw nothing of interest in the boys in my classes. And my regular porn habits—severely restricted while home—always tended to the lesbian. If I ever viewed straight porn it was once or twice to see what it was about and it was never repeated.
I told no one. Not even Annie who, I knew when I was in high school, was definitely not gay, a view that did not waiver for a moment since. Indeed, a disproportionate amount of time I spent with Annie included the ups and downs, and sideways, of her long- and short-term relationships with boys and, eventually, men. I figured that she didn’t try to draw me out about my exploits because, first, she knew I did not have any and, second, she figured I was shy and otherwise engaged. Indeed, it’s not like I did anything with females of the species. And I was never attracted to her, much as she was the classic California blonde. In retrospect, though, I think that while I never told Annie, she might have figured it out and was waiting for me to tell her. I loved that about her. And in fact, I never did anything about it. I kept my desires under wraps. I had plenty of friends and that is all I wanted or needed at the time.
Suddenly I had a friend in Kerry and suddenly I knew that I wanted and needed more with her. But I was disciplined enough to realize that I could do nothing about it just yet (if ever) and I was able to compartmentalize enough to put that aside while I prepared for my exams. Plus everything I knew told me she was straight.
And so Kerry and I and the others in the study group met on campus each day between when classes ended and exams began. It was the most intense mental period I’d ever experienced and one course and one outline bled into another in an eruption of thought. When we took the last exam, the five of us went to a pizzeria on Broadway where we wolfed down a few pies and a few pitchers of beer and caught our breaths for the first time since we had started in August.
We then scattered.
Kerry: The Apartment
While I was confident that I had done well, I wasn’t sure that I had done well. I thought I had picked up all of the issues in the exams but then groaned when a classmate mentioned as we mingled in the hall seeing one that I missed. What was done was done, though, and time to move on and savor the holiday, having survived this next rite-of-passage as an aspiring attorney.
I was a little blitzed when I walked into the house, having had a fair share of the beers we shared with the pizza. My Mom was still at work, and it was a few days before Christmas. I had taken a break the prior Sunday to go with her to pick up a tree and a wreath, and the tree stood decorated in the living room, my Mom having taken care of that and the wreath that was on the front door. I don’t know how she did it.
Of course, Suze was invited to Christmas dinner. She told me at one study session that she’d decided not to go home for the break. She told her mother that she’d decided to take advantage of just being in New York for a while without the pressure of schoolwork and, she told me, her mother got decidedly cold when she, Suze, said she had catching up to do with her Aunt Mary.
They—Suze, Mary, and Betty (Peter and Michael being with their dad)—came to our house for Christmas dinner and presents. My Mom put her face in her hands when I opened something from Suze that turned out to be a COLUMBIA sweatshirt and she said, “You can wear that with the backpack your Mom makes you carry to school.” I threw the shirt at her. But she also gave me a pair of emerald earrings she got from a second-hand shop she visited with Annie in Beacon which I immediately put on my ears, and I gave her a Hermes scarf that I picked up at a consignment shop in town and she delicately wrapped around her neck.
After Christmas, though, Suze stopped answering my calls and responded to my texts with {Suze: Just taking care of some stuff. CU soon}, and when I called Mary about it, she said that Suze was back in the City and was ghosting her too. Neither of us understood why.
Then:
{Kerry: Happy New Year’s. xo}
Followed ten minutes later with:
{Suze: And to you.}
And then no response to my immediate:
{Kerry: See ya soon??}
until January 2:
{Suze: Sorry Kerry, I’m coming down with something.}
Something was majorly wrong. She did not pick up when I called or get back to my voicemails. So on January 3 I just drove down and after twenty minutes was able to find a parking spot a few blocks from Suze’s Apartment. I knew Annie was not around since Suze told me she had gone home for the holiday. Amazingly enough, this would be my first visit to the Apartment. But I thought to back in November: “you ambushed me at my place and I can do the same to you.”