Being Roy, page 19
The toilet flushed and Oscar emerged, his hair curling in wet apostrophes at his temples and droplets clinging to his eyelashes from where he’d splashed his face. Oscar was meticulously clean, and he never went to the bathroom without scrubbing his hands to the elbows and splashing his face and neck. With his spiky eyelashes and ringlets of damp hair, he was almost the old Oscar again.
“Can I take your picture real quick, Os?”
He groaned, slumping into the dinette. “Oh, no, you’re not gonna trick me into some crazy art project where I end up sitting on a hard stool for hours while my butt falls asleep.”
“No, I promise, it’s just a photograph. Super quick. Just stay right like you are.”
“Famous last words.” But he stayed dutifully put and waited while I grabbed my Leica and set up the shot. The late afternoon light from the window caught the angles and swollen discolorations of his face so he looked like a Picasso, or a painting on glass that had been dropped and pieced back together by a blind man. The scar on his lip became a shadow that bisected it like the split grin of a lion. If the transformation of his body had caught me by surprise, the new topography of his face was a revelation. I wanted to paint it, sculpt it, etch it, weld a representation of it together with multicolored scraps of hammered metal. I could spend a lifetime drawing out the magic of that mottled face.
“Could you unbutton your shirt a little, Os?”
“Now you’re talkin’,” he said, grinning as he undid his top four buttons. I rolled my eyes and reached for the finishing touch. I’d kept it close all during break in case I came across another subject for my midterm project.
“Here, put this on.” He raised an eyebrow but did as I asked. “Okay, now hold still.” After testing out a few different angles, moving fast to capture the light before it changed, I did some test shots, got the one I wanted, then took a few more for good measure. After I set the camera down and reclaimed my prop, he grabbed my hand and towed me back to the bedroom, laying me down gently as he lowered himself to the mattress beside me. Oscar was a slow mover and knew I didn’t like being picked up like some wimpy damsel with withered legs, so the whole maneuver caught me by surprise. Before I could voice my objection, he covered my mouth with his and began moving his hands all over my body, paying particular attention to the upper half as he flicked open the buttons of my vest so he could cup my breasts and run his thumbs across my nipples.
Part of me, a small part, liked how commanding he was being, found it exciting in the way Hadley’s overtures had been as I lay in passive acceptance of her touch. Lips, tongues, skin, hands—I wasn’t immune to their spell, but neither was I overcome by it. Most of what thrilled me about being intimate with Oscar was that it was Oscar. What we did in bed was an extension of the connection we shared, not just some hormone-fueled grope sessions. That was not how we were with each other. With Oscar, everything was supposed to feel clear and right. I was supposed to be able to be myself, and I was not a passive person. For a shimmer, just the barest eyelash of a second as his tongue plunged in and out of my mouth, I felt a ripple of unease. He was so much stronger than me now. What if I couldn’t get him to stop? I went rigid at the thought and shoved his hands away, tearing my mouth from his.
“Oscar, stop,” I breathed, trying to keep the edge out of my voice.
“Stop what?” he said with a throaty chuckle, smiling against my lips as he nibbled at my mouth and began pulling apart the pearlized snaps on my shirt.
“Stop,” I said, sitting up to scoot across the bed out of his reach. I resnapped the buttons on my shirt and combed a hand through my spiky hair to settle myself. Oscar crossed his arms behind his head and frowned.
“What’s the matter?”
“Os, you need to tell me what happened to your face, and we have to talk about some other stuff too. I haven’t seen you in almost four months, and you’re acting like some horny jock at a drive-in.” He blushed so that wine red patches darkened the apples of his cheeks. I felt a twinge of regret for being harsh, but I owed it to both of us to hold my ground. We had more important business to tend to than getting in each other’s pants.
“I haven’t seen you in almost four months either,” he pointed out, inching upward to lean against the faux wood paneling behind the bed. “I missed you, Roy. I’ve been thinking about this every day. Didn’t you miss me?” He nudged me playfully with his foot.
“Don’t be silly, Oscar—of course I missed you. I missed you every single day, all day long. How could you even ask that?” I reached out and laid my hand against his cheek. “That’s why I want to talk to you before we get back into all that… stuff.”
“Stuff?” he teased. “Mama Dot didn’t turn you into a revirginized Bible beater while I was gone, did she? Have you taken the Purity Pledge? Because that ship has sailed, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Up yours, Jimenez,” I growled, digging my forefinger and thumb into his pec to give him a purple nurple. He knocked my hand away with a yelp, licking his finger to stick it in my ear for a wet willy. This turned into an all-out slap war until we got laughing so hard we ended up flopped onto our backs sideways across the bed, wheezing for breath. Oscar’s hand brushed mine so that the tiny link was the only place we touched. It was the way we used to do down in the gulley at night when we were younger, inventing new names for all the constellations.
“Remember the Blackstrap Beltway?” he asked softly, reading my thoughts.
“Of course I do,” I said. “That one was mine.”
“Blackstrap was yours. I came up with ‘Beltway.’ I’m the one who’s good at alliteration, if you recall.”
“More like obsessed,” I snorted, squeezing his pinky with mine. “Remember when you asked your parents if you could change your name to ‘Jorge,’ so you’d have an “h” sound to match your last name? So porno.” He laughed and squeezed back.
“I need to know what happened to you, Os,” I said, keeping my eyes on the ceiling. “You said we could tell each other anything.”
When he spoke, the smile was gone from his voice. “Okay, but then you. Let’s just do it all at once so we can enjoy the rest of the week.”
“Deal.”
“It was that guy I wrote to you about. Darren. The one from the team.”
“That first-string asshole who was jealous of you and kept messing with your stuff?” I propped myself on one elbow and looked down into Oscar’s guarded face.
“Yes, but I started the fight,” he said, eyes closed. “I just snapped. It was kind of nuts.”
“Why?” He shook his head. “Oscar, look at me. Why did you start that fight? You’ve never hit anyone in your life.”
Oscar gave me a pleading look. “It doesn’t matter, Roy, okay? It’s fine now. He’s off the team.”
“What about you? Shit, Oscar, did you get kicked off the team? What about your scholarship?”
“I’m still on the team. The coaches found out what happened. The other guys backed me up.”
I sat all the way up and crossed my legs. “Tell me all of it, Oscar. This is bullshit. You’ve never kept anything from me before. This isn’t what we do.” Oscar threw an arm over his eyes.
“He was saying stuff about you, Roy. About your picture and how you looked like a lesbian, a ‘fucking dyke,’ he said. He called me a ‘wetback faggot,’ and started telling all the guys on the team that I was gay and had a boyfriend.”
“Asshole,” I said. “But Os, we’ve both been dealing with that shit our whole lives. Why didn’t you just ignore it? You always say how getting riled gives bullies more power.”
Oscar’s face darkened as he rubbed his thumb across the abrasions on the knuckles of his right hand. “He took your picture from my locker and cut your face out. He pasted it onto some nasty picture in Playgirl magazine of these two naked guys doing stuff, then he cut my picture out from the team photo and pasted it over the other guy’s face and put it up in the Student Center.” I blanched. How many people had seen that? I wouldn’t ever have to meet them, but Oscar had three and half years left of being the guy from that picture. He took his arm away from his face.
“At least the other guys didn’t support him,” he said. “One of them spotted the picture and took it down. I think it was only up for a couple of hours, but it was during the breakfast rush, so plenty of people saw. My roommate took it straight to the coaches. It was pretty obvious who did it. Darren didn’t make any secret of hating my guts.”
“Oh, Os, I’m so sorry.” I put my hand on his cheek and laid my head on his chest. His heart crashed against my ear.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, smoothing his hand over my cropped hair.
“But you beat him up to defend me.”
“I swung at him because he made me mad for your sake and mine. He beat the crap out of me because he’s better at fighting, but I don’t regret going after him. He knew exactly how to get under my skin. I needed to do it, Roy. I’m so tired of turning the other cheek.”
“What do you mean you needed to do it?” I asked, sliding myself all the way down so my body pressed against the length of his side. He raised his arm so I could duck under it and adjust my head into the crook of his neck, careful not to get him in the ribs with my elbow.
“This is hard for me to talk about,” he began. “I feel like no one has invented the words for this yet. Does that make sense? Do you ever feel that way?”
“You know I have.”
“I’m not antigay, Roy, but I’m not gay either. I’m not. I didn’t want him calling you those names, and I didn’t want to be called them myself. I love you just as you are, but in my eyes, you’re a girl and I’m a guy. I know it’s not that simple for you, and that’s fine, but it is for me.” Oscar rolled me over onto my back and loomed over me, blocking out the faint light from the dinette. “I love your body, Roy. I love your face and the softness of your skin and the weight of your breasts in my hands. I love being inside you, because I become a part of you, but also because it’s the only part of us where I get to feel like a man, being with a woman. Like normal. I didn’t realize how much I wanted that until I had time away to figure it out. You’ve called the shots since we were kids, and that was all right for a while, but I need it to be different sometimes. I need to know that you accept me for who I am. It’s okay with me if you don’t want me because I’m a man, but I don’t want you to want me in spite of it. I can’t handle that.”
The weight of his words, ten times heavier than the burden of his body on top of mine, threatened to crush me. Oscar had never spoken so strongly and at such length about his feelings before. Had he kept his true feelings a secret in order to protect me? How was it possible to love someone so much and feel betrayed by them at the same time? I knew he didn’t mean to hurt me. He was just being honest about who he was, the way I had been when we were thirteen. But if we could hurt each other just by being who we were, then what chance could we possibly have at a life together? I couldn’t breathe.
“Oscar, I need you to get off,” I said, and without a moment’s resistance, he rolled away.
In wordless agreement, we got up and went to sit in the neutral territory of the dinette. Seated across from each other, we fiddled with each other’s hands, gazes locked on our fingers as if the answers to the puzzle between us could be found there. His hands bore new calluses, ridges of toughened flesh at the base of each finger from lifting weights. I fought the urge to peel them off to get back to the tender, pliable Oscar beneath.
“I don’t know if I can give you what you want, Os.” My lips wouldn’t stop trembling no matter how hard I pressed them, and tears scored wet tracks down either side of my nose.
“I just want you.”
I shook my head. “I know you love me, but I don’t fit anywhere in that thing you want. I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, Os. You’re just you. But I don’t feel like a woman in the way you want, and I don’t want you to love me in spite of that. It’s the same problem either way.”
Oscar tugged at the knot of our fingers to extract his hands and leaned back. “But what does that even mean?” he argued. “You’re female and you love me, and I’m male and I love you. It is what it is.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said, using the sleeve of my shirt to scrub at my cheeks. I caught my reflection in the window, rumpled and sad.
“Is this about what you didn’t want to tell me in your letters?” In the fallout of Oscar’s bombshell, if that term could be applied to something I probably knew all along, I’d forgotten all about Hadley.
“No,” I hedged. “Not totally. This is about you and me, Os.”
Oscar’s almond eyes narrowed to slivers, and he sat up so our knees were no longer touching under the table. “Maybe you’d better tell me anyway.”
Like lancing a boil, I reassured myself. The pressure is more painful than the cut. The words were an avalanche of rough boulders, and I watched helplessly as they slammed into Oscar.
“I kissed Hadley, Os. Or she kissed me. I didn’t start it, but I didn’t stop it right away either. The kissing only happened once, when she was here, but there was some touching that happened another time. Not for very long. She’s just a friend. It didn’t mean anything.” The clichés tumbled out before I could stop them, and what was worse, I wasn’t even sure they were true. Was Hadley just a friend to me? And how could I have said it meant nothing when the shattered look on his face told me it meant everything? Until Hadley, Oscar was the only person I’d ever kissed.
“Here?”
“What?”
“You said you kissed her when she was here?”
I nodded, shaking salt into the fresh wound.
“Where?” he asked.
“In the bed.”
Oscar’s head fell forward. I reached out to place a hand on his arm, but he jerked away from my touch.
“We were all sleeping together, like a slumber party. I woke up and she was so close and both of us weren’t even all the way awake. It wasn’t planned, Os. It just happened.”
“You should have told me before now,” he said, pulling his arm away. “Is this why you’re having doubts about us? Because you want to be with her?”
“No, I told you. It was totally random. But….” Don’t say it, I warned myself. Stop now. But I was already hip deep in a hole that I couldn’t stop digging.
“But what?”
“But I did feel something, Oscar. Not, like, deep heart feelings like I have for you. Body feelings.”
“Body feelings? What does that even mean?” Oscar shouted, jumping up from the table and pacing in the narrow aisle.
I stood up to block his route and grabbed him by the shoulders. “It means that it confused the hell out of me. I’d never thought of being with a girl that way before, but all of a sudden it was happening. Putting us aside, it didn’t feel wrong. I’m just trying to be honest with you.”
Oscar broke my hold so that our forearm bones clashed together, and made for the door. He paused, a hand on the handle. “I would never put us aside,” he said to the door.
“Oscar, don’t.”
He turned. “So what, you’re a lesbian now, is that it?”
“Os, would you come here, please?”
“I can’t be close to you right now. Just answer the question. Are you gay?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know,” I said and walked over to him. “Would you just listen? It’s like you said. There don’t seem to be any words for this. I’m just trying to figure it all out, same as you, and it’s really hard to do that if I’m trying to be something for somebody else. I’m worried that I’m going to keep hurting you.”
Oscar turned his head, sadness stripping away the years until he was that same kid I found crying down in the gulley because some bully at school told him the police were going to take his parents away in the night. I might have started loving Oscar right then, and hating anyone who could be so cruel to someone so good. Now that someone was me.
“So we can’t be together because you can’t be yourself around me?” Oscar asked, searching my face. “Since when? I thought that was the best part of us. Was that even real?” His face crumbled and I grabbed for his hand.
“No, Oscar, shhh, please don’t say that! I love you so much. You’re my best friend.” He sniffed and pulled away. I clasped my hands in front of me to keep from reaching for him again.
“I always wondered what would happen if I stopped letting you have your way all the time,” he croaked. “If I stood up for myself more instead of letting you call the shots. Is this it? I’m not gay, Roy, even if you wish I was.”
“I know that, Os. I never meant to make you feel like that—”
“—and I want a girlfriend,” he said, his voice thick with tears. “Someone who can stand to call herself that. Can’t you just try? Please just try. I just want you. I want to be with you.”
“Os, I don’t know if I can,” I said, matching him tear for tear. “I love you—isn’t that enough?” I threw myself into his arms, and he clutched at me, both of us weeping like children until there was nothing left.
After Oscar went home, I sat staring at his forgotten duffel under the table, battling with the urge to hate myself. Hating myself felt like the virtuous thing to do, the thing that would absolve me of my sins. Yet as haunted as I was by Oscar’s hurt, I couldn’t submit to guilt. Yes, it was wrong to get carried away with Hadley when I was in a relationship with Oscar, but it wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t be what Oscar wanted. I couldn’t give up my own identity for his sake any more than he could change his for mine. I wasn’t about to feel guilty for that. What scared me stupid, though, was the thought of losing him as my friend. How could I ever know who I was if I lost the only person who really knew me?
