Here We Go Again, page 17
This. This isn’t just a kiss.
She thought Rosemary would kiss like they’re in a Jane Austen novel, but she kisses her like they’re in a Jane Austen movie adaptation.
A demon from hell begins to roar at them, and Logan and Rosemary come apart in a scramble of squelching limbs and confusion and regret. It’s Odie. He’s thrashing against the back window of the van, barking for his freedom. Poor dog. Logan had no choice but to leave the car running and the AC on when she went inside the hospital for news, but Odie still looks traumatized.
Rosemary looks traumatized, too. She still has rain clinging to her pale lashes and her bottom lip is plump, already swollen. Logan feels a surge of triumph. She did that. She made Rosemary Hale lose control.
Rosemary smooths down the hem of her soaking dress. “Well, I think I proved my point.”
“What point was that?”
“That you do feel something for me, whether you’re willing to admit it or not.”
Logan laughs in the rain. “Oh, I definitely feel something for you.”
Rosemary puckers that swollen mouth into her cat’s-asshole face, and Logan just wants to kiss her again. They’re still standing there, still staring at each other. Odie barks again.
“We… we should go check on Joe.” Rosemary attempts to compose herself, but the evidence of the kiss is still written all over her blush.
“We definitely should,” Logan agrees.
The anxious tendon in Rosemary’s neck sticks out, and Logan hopes this isn’t her last chance to touch that spot.
“Joe,” Rosemary repeats.
“Joe,” Logan says. She will find a way to touch that tendon again.
* * *
“Gas, huh?” Logan smirks as she flops onto Joe’s hospital bed beside him.
“We will never discuss this again,” he says grimly. Then he cranes his head to eye Logan beside him before he stares at Rosemary hovering on his other side.
“Why are you both wet and guilty-looking?”
Chapter Nineteen
ROSEMARY
“I’m going to come,” Logan moans. “Seriously, I’m about to orgasm.”
Rosemary kicks her under the table. “Could you not? We’re in public.”
Logan obscenely licks a glob of green chilies off her finger, and Rosemary does not think about kissing her yesterday. Not even a little bit. “I can’t help it. This is a sexual eating experience.”
They’re eating brunch at the Pueblo Indian Kitchen that’s part of the cultural center in Albuquerque. Joe insisted they drive here straight from the hospital, since Rosemary had been so excited about it as part of their detour. But if she’d known Logan would make such pornographic noises while eating her Rancheros de Albuquerque, Rosemary might have protested the decision. Rosemary tries to focus on her Pueblo pie, but it’s… distracting.
Logan unleashes one last toe-curling groan, then throws down her cloth napkin to signal the end of her meal. “I think it’s time to address the elephant dick in the room,” she announces as she rubs her belly contentedly. She then reaches into the backpack at her feet and pulls out the nude painting of Joe. Slams it down on the table in the middle of the crowded patio.
Joe chokes on his atole. Rosemary is equally disoriented to find herself reunited with Joe’s penis.
“How…?” Joe tries. “How did you get that?”
“We have our ways. Which is to say, we bought it over the phone before we left Santa Fe,” Logan answers with an equally distracting wink at Rosemary. “And the gallerist kindly delivered it to our hotel room.”
“It was fifteen hundred dollars!”
“And worth every penny on the credit card I’ll never pay off,” Logan sings.
“And you’ve been carrying that around in your backpack?”
“Where else would I keep a naked painting of my English teacher?”
“We?” Joe clutches his chest and gasps. “You said we! Rosie, my favorite, please tell me you had nothing to do with the acquisition of this art?”
She gives him a pitying look. “I had to.”
“Honestly, if I had a nude where I looked this good, I would want it preserved in the Smithsonian.”
“I died, didn’t I?” Joe closes his eyes and does a pantomime of the sign of the cross. “I died in that hospital, and now I’m in hell.”
“Joe.” Rosemary grabs his shoulder. “We have to talk about Remy St. Patin. He was clearly very important to you.”
Joe visibly flinches at Remy’s name. “He… he didn’t mean anything to me.”
“False.” Logan jabs a finger at the painting. “Exhibit A: you’re semihard in this painting.”
Joe waves his hand. “Enough about my dick. Put that thing away.”
Logan slowly places it face down on the table.
“Exhibit B: you still carry around his handkerchief.”
Joe shifts nervously in his chair. “Okay, fine. Fine. I’ll tell you about Remy. I-I should’ve just told you about him in the first place.”
Logan makes a smug go ahead gesture. Joe takes a deep breath.
“Remy was… a man I once knew,” he starts specifically.
“In the Biblical sense, clearly.”
His pain grimace appears in the corner of his mouth. “He was my…”
“Lover?” Logan guesses.
Joe heaves a sigh proportional to Logan’s badgering. “I was going to say that he was my one regret.”
Rosemary glances over at Logan to find she’s already glancing at her. Her eyes look like honey in the morning sun.
Rosemary pulls her gaze away.
“We lived together, in Bar Harbor, for five years,” Joe continues, “but we met long before that. At NYU in ’81. My junior year of undergrad. I was a good Catholic boy back then. I was living the life my parents wanted, even though I’d moved across the country to escape them. I went to mass every Sunday, I was active in the on-campus ministry, and I was even dating a good Catholic girl named Alma Ortiz.”
Rosemary tries to picture twenty-year-old Joe: Bible tucked under his arm and a girl’s hand in his. Nothing feels right about that image.
Joe keeps talking, and his voice begins to take on that rhythmic quality she associates with his lectures. “Alma was from New Orleans, and my family lived in San Antonio at the time. Junior year, we decided to carpool home for the holidays. The plan was for me to stay with her family for a few days, and then my brother would come to pick me up on Christmas Eve and take me home. Alma had a Pontiac station wagon, and to help cover the cost of gas, we put up one of those bulletin board ads offering to drive other students who lived along the way. Remy was the only person who answered.”
“Like in When Harry Met Sally?” Logan asks.
“Yes, exactly like that, except my girlfriend was there too. But Remy…” Here Joe pauses. Sighs. “He was the prettiest boy I’d ever seen, and I felt this immediate need to know him, to impress him. We talked the whole drive, about Cervantes and Márquez and Goya. Audre Lorde and Angela Davis. About being brown and Black in a place like NYU, navigating spaces that weren’t meant for us. About Freire, and artists we loved. He showed me his sketchbook, and I showed him my poems. In his presence, I felt like I was transforming into the person I was always meant to be. I… I loved him instantly.”
Rosemary forces herself not to look at Logan, not to think about friendship and kisses and becoming your truest self around someone who makes you feel safe.
“When we arrived at Remy’s parents’ house in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, I broke up with Alma and I stayed with Remy instead.”
Logan whistles. “Joe, that’s a brutal way to break up with someone. And this is coming from me, the king of brutal breakups.”
Joe looks entirely unapologetic. “Alma was comfortable. Remy was real.”
Absolutely not. Rosemary will not look at Logan.
“It was the most perfect week of my life. I spent the holidays with his family, sleeping on the floor of his childhood bedroom. Remy’s parents knew he was gay, and they just… loved him anyway. That was such a miracle to me.”
“What about your parents?” Logan asks gently.
Joe takes a bite of his porridge and swallows. “Alma’s father called my father to tell him what happened, what he… suspected. My brother never came to pick me up for Christmas.”
“Joe, I’m so—”
“No sorrys, Rosie darling.” Joe offers her a wan smile. “I chose what I chose, and I knew choosing Remy would come with pain. I chose him anyway.”
She can’t help it any longer. Rosemary looks at Logan, and oh, the ache of yesterday’s kiss floods her bones. She’s fourteen again, tasting that popsicle mouth. She’s thirty-two, and that mouth is a strawberry milkshake. If she kissed her right now, would she taste like homemade tortillas and green chilies and Pueblo pie, like sugar and spice? Like something real?
Yesterday, kissing Logan in the rain felt like writing when the words were good. It felt like everything inside her was clicking together, instinct and art melding in her fingertips, like that was the thing she was put on this earth to do. Write stories and kiss Logan Maletis.
“Remy and I moved in together as soon as we got back to New York,” Joe says, pulling Rosemary out of her own thoughts. “I came out to our small circle of friends. I stopped going to church. My parents wouldn’t talk to me, but I didn’t care. We were young, idealistic artists living on the Lower East Side. We thought nothing could touch us, until everything did. Remy was my first… everything.”
“You were an artist?” Logan asks with that pouty mouth Rosemary can’t stop staring at.
“Poetry. That’s what I studied at NYU. After undergrad, I got a job teaching at a Waldorf school to support myself while I did open mic nights and poetry readings. On the weekends, we did drag shows, making just enough money to cover the cost of submissions to magazines that might publish my work. Remy waited tables to pay the rent and painted every other second of the day. We lived above a Middle Eastern restaurant, and the apartment always smelled like falafel and turpentine, and I truly thought we would never stop loving each other.”
The words fall out of his mouth in that musical voice he used as a teacher, and Rosemary feels like she’s listening to him read a poem she knows will rip her heart out in the end.
“So, what happened?”
“The AIDS crisis happened.”
Logan’s tan face goes visibly ashen across the table. “Remy… he didn’t… die, did he?”
“No,” Joe answers, “but so many of our friends did. It was everywhere, all the time. The specter of death. I felt like I was choking on the air I breathed on the way to work.” The tears come quickly to Joe’s eyes, and then they’re in Rosemary’s eyes, too, as she absorbs his hurt. Joe hasn’t publicly cried over his prognosis in the last four years, but here he is, sobbing now at the memory of everything he lost. She’s always known there are parts of Joe’s queer experience she will never fully understand as a white woman, but she’d never allowed the true horrors of what he lived through to sink in.
“Remy was always the fighter, and he got involved right away. Attended Act Up meetings, went to protests, got arrested—so completely desperate to get the government to care that we were dying. He always coped with tragedy by turning outward to those around him, to people he could help. I coped by turning inward.”
He shakes his head like he still carries guilt over such a valid reaction to the sheer terror of an epidemic of that magnitude.
“I never wanted to leave our apartment. I stopped writing poetry. I sat on the couch watching Mary Tyler Moore reruns, wishing I could live in the version of America I saw on TV. I was so consumed by the fear of losing Remy that I started losing him while he was still right in front of me.”
Rosemary looks at Logan. She looks and looks and looks. There’s nothing unfeeling in that expression now.
“I needed to leave the city for my mental health, and I convinced Remy to move even though he wanted to stay. We found a small cottage in Maine that I could afford with the money I’d saved from teaching, and we lived there, in a safe little bubble, for five years. They were beautiful years, close to the sea and mountains and trees. I got a job teaching English at the local high school, and living in Maine, Remy could afford to paint full-time. I wanted to believe we could be happy like that forever. Drinking coffee on our front porch while we watched the sunrise, wine at sunset. But…”
Joe sighs again. Rosemary looks.
“But Remy never wanted to leave the city, where we could be close to the art scene and the queer community, and I could tell I was holding him back. He wanted a life of adventure, and I wanted a life that was safe. I kept trying to end things, but we’d been together for fifteen years, and Remy couldn’t let go. So, one day, I packed up all my things and I moved as far away from Bar Harbor as I could, without telling him. I left a note and just… disappeared.”
“That’s how you ended up in Vista Summit?” Rosemary asks in a hushed tone. Tears drip down her chin, and under the table, Odie puts his head on her lap. She starts to shove the dog away, but there’s something comforting about the weight of him, the feeling of his silky fur beneath her fingers.
Logan violently pushes aside her own tears with the back of her hand. “Wait, did you say you used to do drag?”
Rosemary fixes all her attention on Joe. “And that’s your one regret? Leaving him?”
Joe stares out at the parking lot of the Pueblo Indian Kitchen. “I regret the way I left.”
Rosemary uses Odysseus’s ears like a stim toy, stoking back and forth to soothe herself from the secondhand heartache.
“I was so convinced that I was going to lose Remy eventually that I hurt him before he could hurt me.”
Now they’re both looking at Logan. She squints, like the sun is in her eyes, and shoves her sunglasses onto her face.
Joe keeps staring at Logan anyway. “I took away his agency and made the decision for him. And I regret that very much.”
“Have you told him that?” Rosemary asks.
“I haven’t spoken to him since I left. It’s been thirty years.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Logan screams. Several other patrons turn to glare. “Pick up the damn phone and call the man! Tell him you’re sorry, and you still love him!”
“I-I’m not… still in love with him.”
“Oscar fucking Wilde, then what was that entire Nora Ephron bullshit you just spewed at us?”
Joe stares down at his half-empty bowl. “I wouldn’t even know how to find Remy after all this time….”
“Because the internet doesn’t exist?”
Rosemary already has her phone open. “Remy St. Patin…” She ticks her nails against the screen. “… owner of the Heather on the Hill gallery, 1224 Government Street. Ocean Springs, Mississippi.”
Logan picks up her napkin just so she can throw it down on the table theatrically. “That’s it! Next stop: Mississippi!”
“Absolutely not.”
“Absolutely yes!” Logan jumps up from the table. “Rosemary, grab the dog and the leftovers. We’re going to find Remy St. Patin.”
“Logan!” Joe pleads.
“Joseph!” Logan pleads back.
“Joe,” Rosemary says. “You brought us to Santa Fe. You dragged us around art galleries. You wanted to find him.”
Joe meets her eyes, and she sees a new level of vulnerability there. He’s so… human, this man she’s immortalized. He loves and he fucks up and he regrets. He makes mistakes and makes amends. “This is your death trip. Do you really want to have regrets when it’s over?”
He considers this, his head tilted toward the warm sun. “I really did look fantastic in that painting, didn’t I?” Joe wonders in visible awe at himself.
Rosemary holds his gaze. “You were the prettiest man I’ve ever seen.”
Joe’s lip quivers a bit in response before he squares his shoulders. “No regrets,” Joe grumbles under his breath. Rosemary contemplates whether she’ll be able to say no regrets at the end and mean it. “Okay. Let’s go to Mississippi.”
Logan punches her fist toward the sky. “Fuck yes! To Mississippi.”
“You girls want some Tuesdays with Morrie advice?” Joe says when they’re all back in the car. “Here it is. Take more nudes while you’re young.”
Albuquerque, New Mexico to Ocean Springs, Mississippi
Chapter Twenty
LOGAN
There is the small matter of Mississippi being three states and one thousand miles away.
Logan expects Rosemary to panic, or at the very least, pull out her printer and diligently remake the itinerary at this abrupt change in plans. But when they stop at the Four Winds Travel Center for gas and snacks, Logan pulls Rosemary aside to check-in on how she’s feeling and is mystified by her apparent calm.
“You’re sure this detour is okay?” Logan asks softly, bartering for Rosemary’s truth.
But Rosemary looks determined. “We have to go to Mississippi. For Joe. Besides, it is, technically, getting us closer to Maine.”
Logan doesn’t argue with her logic. She just gets in the Gay Mobile and drives.
A little before noon, they cross the border into Texas. And western Texas kind of sucks.
It’s all flat fields and giant billboards with statements that are either aggressively pro-Jesus or anti-teacher. She didn’t know anti-teacher billboards were a thing, but apparently everything is bigger in Texas, including hatred.
The other drivers on I-40 East do not seem to like the Gay Mobile, and they make this known with car horns and middle fingers. A woman at a gas station waits outside the bathroom to corner Logan to tell her that the homosexuals stole the rainbow from Jesus.
“Time for gay shit,” Logan says when they get back in the car.
“Let’s not be any gayer than is strictly necessary,” Rosemary squeaks from behind the wheel. They’re all feeling on edge.
