DON’T BE CRUEL

I finished the Scottish police procedural minutes before it was time to leave the house for dinner. I read somewhere that writers should stop reading other people’s stuff. Not me. I’m lost without the pile of books on my nightstand. I break out in a cold sweat if I don’t have a choice, craving the attention like a spaniel. I crawl into bed each night with a little anticipation, almost as if a lover awaits. The warm body next to me in the clean coolness of the sheets is a book, not a man.

The last time it was a man, I didn’t like the story. I had to put that one back on the shelf before I came to the ending. I knew it was over before it began, the relationship with G---. I watched as I let my longing trump my good sense. I longed too much for the warmth in the bed next to me. I missed the stillness and the fun, the fire. I yearned to be with one man again after so many years.

We met in a men’s group. It started as a carnal thing. He was shorter and slimmer and only a little younger. His salt and pepper hair poked up in a funny cowlick in the front. His Northern British accent was cute. In the beginning I loved the way he tripped over his convoluted sentences, screwing up his face to get it right. He tried so hard to get it right, to please. The need in his eyes aroused me. His trim little body was too tan for a Brit, brown all over except for the white pattern left by his tiny spandex thong. The tan covered his butt, too. The cheeks were firm and round, but seemed to be one size larger than the rest of his body. That was the clincher, that made me hard.

He admitted to a late start in the gay life, a long interior yearning of his own, put into gear the past few years. A furious devouring of workshops and men’s groups and the like. Each successive disclosure, each step into the honest terrain of intimacy, clarified just how large an iceberg would be lurking in the dark waters of his soul. My fires were insufficient to melt this cold.

It was Martin Luther King weekend, two weeks after another disastrous holiday spent together. It drove us apart, not together. Less intimacy, not more. I knew then that it was over, and did not let him come to the house.

How do you break a heart with your own heart open? We sat next to each other on the big down-filled cushions of the couch in my media room. I reached out for his hand. I would not be cruel, I would not hurt him.

“Baby, it’s not working, this has to end.”

His hand was clammy and much smaller than mine. His smell reached me, the sour of a man, the sweetness of soap, the sharpness of metal. I wanted to flick his cowlick of gray, its color flattened by the muted midwinter sun streaming in from the window. He needed a haircut. I could hear a single bird outside, its song cutting through the silence. G--- was so quiet that I missed it when he started to cry. His brown cheeks were awash and he did not wipe them dry.

He sat staring, looking nowhere, not at me, unable to look at me. I waited, holding the silence like a bomb. I held back a torrent of words: explanations, elaborations, justifications. I had learned how to hold the stillness. I held his hand and held my gaze. I took him in.

Still, I had the overwhelming desire to fix what I had just broken. I could not hold my gaze and I looked away from him. I noticed the time on the matte black cable box across the room. Why doesn’t he say something? Why doesn’t he hit me, push me away, let me in.

This is why it had to end. He’s waiting for me to tell him to fight.