Taking Chances Read online

  BY THE time I walked into work, all I could think of was The Boy. I wondered if his family still lived in Foster. The whole morning, if I had more than thirty seconds to myself, my attention would drift back to that day when I knew I was sexually attracted to him, and not in a small way. After that, I thought I was so obvious that everyone in town was just being nice to me while laughing behind my back the whole time. They had to have noticed the way I stared too long or looked away too fast. The way I got too loud when the conversation turned to sex or the way I seemed to have no interest in girls at all. Everything I did and said was under a veil of self-scrutiny, looking for any hint that I was less of a man than the rest of them. After a while, I began talking about girls, loudly and awkwardly. I tried drinking beer in the back of whichever pickup I was riding in on our way to the lake; and I even asked a girl to the Winter Formal.

  None of it made me any straighter.

  My phone rang in my office, dispelling my memories for the moment.

  “Matt Wallace,” I answered, trying to dispel the Ghost of Adolescence Past from my brain.

  “Matty?” my mother’s voice asked through the phone. “Matty, is that you?”

  “Hi, Mom,” I answered, silently groaning because I knew what call this was.

  “Are you busy? I know it’s the afternoon.”

  My mother comes from the generation that believes the afternoon is for work and work only. It means you were either busy working or busy trying to avoid work. She didn’t understand how I could sit in an office every day wearing a suit and dealing with computers and still have more than enough spare time to talk on the phone and not get in trouble.

  “I’m fine, Mom, what’s up?” I assured her, knowing without it she would never get to the reason she called.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “I’m at work, Mom; you called me,” I said, trying to keep the shortness out of my voice.

  “Well, I don’t know how this thing works!” she complained, meaning she was on the cell phone I had bought her last year. “I’m afraid I’m going to break it sometimes.”

  “I’m at work and it’s fine, Mom,” I said, trying to focus her before she went off on a tangent about technology today being purposely overcomplicated.

  “Well, I just got off the phone with Teresa”—that was my oldest brother’s wife—“and she was checking in for Christmas, and I realized I hadn’t heard from you yet. You are coming, right?” She asked in the same way a mob boss would ask if I understood that we were family and family had certain obligations.

  “Yes, Mother,” I said, trying not to sigh. “I e-mailed you my itinerary.”

  “Well, this thing doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to!” she exclaimed, which was her way of saying she had received my message but had been unable to decipher it.

  I bit my cheek to keep from explaining it was a brand new computer running Honeycomb 7, which I knew because I had bought it for them for my father’s birthday. I knew the words would fall on deaf ears. She no more understood that the computer was top of the line than she understood what I did as a tech editor for a blog. There were simply too many words in that sentence that just made no sense to her. It was easier to blame the machine and use it as an excuse to call me and ask what she was after instead.

  “I fly in Thursday,” I said, checking my own e-mail to make sure I had the times right. “I arrive around 4:00 p.m. your time.”

  “Do you need us to pick you up from the airport?”

  “I’m renting a car when I land, Mom.” I was getting snippy, because she was drawing the call out longer than usual.

  “Okay! Don’t snap my head off.” We were quiet for several seconds. She waited for me to give her an opening to ask me “the question,” and I waited for her to realize I wasn’t. Finally, she gave in. “So are you coming alone?”

  And there it was.

  I could never figure out if she was asking because she was concerned I was alone or that she was worried I would bring a guy with me one year. Either way, the question annoyed me, and I was unable to keep it out of my tone. “You know I am, Mom.”

  “Well, fine,” she said, obviously exasperated. “I was just asking.”

  She was prying and she knew it.

  “And I answered.” I tried to end the call before it became an actual thing.

  “You know, my friend Frances has a son who is….” She paused, still unable to say it out loud. “…too. Maybe you know him?”

  I was done. “Yes, I do know him. I saw him at the last Gay Men with Pushy Mothers meeting. He’s a nice guy; we’re getting married next month.”

  Now I could almost hear the irritation radiating from of her. “Well, excuse me for trying to understand your life! I’ll go now and stop bugging you.”

  “Mom, you’re not…,” I began to recant.

  “See you Thursday,” she said as if I’d never spoken and hung up.

  I slammed the phone down and tried not to scream. “Fucking Christmas!”

  From the way people stared at me, I’m pretty sure I failed.

  The rest of the day sucked. I tried, unsuccessfully, to focus on the work at hand and not about a boy I had seen a decade ago and had never forgotten. It wasn’t until I got home and called Sophia to tell her how my day had gone that I had time to actually take a breath.

  “Going postal at your job?” Sophia quipped. “They’ll all say you seemed like such a nice boy.”

  I was lying on my comically undersized couch with my calves resting on the edge. I had bought it in a fit of “trying to be metropolitan” and paid the price for it. It cost too much money, was out of style the second I got it home, and it barely fit a man half my size. I was what Sophia called corn-fed, which sounded dangerously close to fat. Sophia assured me that it meant “hot.”

  I didn’t feel hot.

  “And you’d show up at my funeral looking like what’s-her-name from Fight Club: black makeup, shades, chain-smoking up a storm. And they’d wonder where I ever met such an ugly drag queen.”

  “Fuck off!” she shrieked in my ear. “And it’s Helena Bonham Carter, you jackass. She is in, like, every other movie we watch.”

  “Every movie you pick, you mean.”

  She paused, mock outrage in her voice. “I’m not the one who wants to see every single sci-fi or cartoon piece of shit that comes out! It’s like being friends with a twelve-year-old. At least I try to interject some culture into your hick ass.”

  It was true. I had no culture.

  I’d remained largely unchanged since I moved from Foster, the only difference being that I now knew where gay men were but was still single. The gay scene was too loud for me; it was boisterous and rowdy and every weekend seemed to be an excuse for someone or other to throw another idiotic party. None of it made any sense to me. What was a White Party and how was it different from a Red Party? I was pretty sure the difference had to do with sex, but there was no way I was going to ask anyone to find out for sure.

  “So you were nasty to your mom.” Sophia prompted me out of my thoughts.

  “I wasn’t nasty,” I lied, knowing I had indeed been nasty. “It was the yearly ‘Do I have to worry about my son dying single?’ phone call. Believe me, that gets old.”

  “She cares.”

  I sighed deeply. “She cares insomuch that she can’t find a way to control my life like she does with my brothers. It would be better if she would scold me for making Jesus cry because I’m having congress with the beast and move on, but she isn’t even that religious.”

  “You having congress with anyone, much less a beast, would be a freaking miracle.”

  “Shut up,” I snapped.

  “I mean it! Walking on water seems pale in comparison to the Great White Matt getting his groove on.”

  She was baiting me, but I didn’t have the energy to rise to it. “What are you and whatshisname doing tonight?” I asked in an attempt to change the subject.

  “You know his name is�
��” Something I forgot the second she said it. Arthur? Lance? Clay? Harold? I just couldn’t keep it in my head. “I don’t know why you refuse to remember it.” Hearing annoyance in her voice was petty revenge, but it was all the justice coming my way for the night.

  “Because in another four months you’ll find him in bed getting fucked by some guy from the gym, and you’ll say you had no clue he was secretly gay and I’ll have to hear it.”

  She was quiet for so long I thought she might have hung up. Finally, in a soft voice she said, “That is a horrible thing to say, Matt.”

  And instantly I felt like shit.

  “Why do you automatically assume he’s a bottom? That is just cruel.”

  Her laughter was like a witch’s curse.

  “Good night,” I said, knowing I had been outplayed.

  “Have fun in the corn!” she said before I hung up.

  As I drifted off to sleep, my mind, of course, went to the past.

  FOR the rest of that summer, I discovered and invented reasons to walk past his house every day—twice a day, if I could manage it. In reality, everything that counted in town lay one hundred and eighty degrees from the direction I headed, but I began taking the long way, which was pretty much two blocks up, pass his house, and then turn around back toward town, just for a chance I could see him. A right turn past his house, another right turn on Elm Street, and a straight line back into town, all of this just for a chance to see him.

  Most of the time, I made the trip fruitlessly. I might as well have been looking for some kind of mythical creature. I only caught glimpses of him, never a full-on sighting like the one I’d had the first Saturday. I was pretty sure if anyone caught me, I’d be dead. The only logical reason to pass by his house was that I was a secret fag and wanted to commit unnatural acts on his body. “Secret fag” were the exact words that pounded through my head every time I passed by his house. They would be the exact words my mother would use when she explained to my father what I had been doing when I got picked up by the police. My father, knowing he had already raised two strapping young straight men, would realize he should have stopped at a duo and lock me in the basement.

  All they’d have needed to do was tell anyone who asked that they never had a third son; it had been a neighborhood friend of my brothers, and people had just assumed he was related. Or I had been farmed out to do menial tasks by a cruel uncle, Theodosius, and had finally returned home to take over plowing the fields on the home farm, literally. I would have spent the rest of my life in the cellar, wondering what the real world was like.

  None of that stopped me from passing his home as many times as I could.

  The house wasn’t as large as ours, but it had a big backyard, surrounded by what looked like a homemade wooden fence that had seen better times. It was like a house that had given up on trying to be anything more than just a place to live. The cracks through the fence didn’t show much of the backyard. It wasn’t easy to see back there, but from what I could tell, they didn’t use the backyard for anything more than storage. The trees were overgrown, casting the entire area in perpetual shadows; toys discarded, a few bikes. It wasn’t dirty per se; it just wasn’t perfect like my dad kept ours. The only thing I could see clearly was the back door.

  It was red.

  More accurately, the door must have been red at one point. By the time I saw it that summer, time and use had worn the color almost away, and it was a door that had been red. Nothing about the door, the house, or the yard was trashy. Instead, everything looked worn, as if better days had come and gone. After more than a week of passing by his house, hoping to see him mowing the lawn or perhaps doing jumping jacks in just a pair of gym shorts—hey, it could happen!—I began to wonder if I had imagined him. That whatever sickness had taken up residence in my loins had used its powers to manifest erotic illusions of half-naked boys doing chores in hopes of driving me insane.

  If that was the plan, it was working.

  On afternoons we didn’t have practice, I would ditch my brothers and take my roundabout shortcut past his place, my fingers crossed he’d be there. If I couldn’t see him out front, I would move around to the side and check through the holes in the fence. Like a junkie scrambling for another hit, I would peer into the darkness of the backyard in hopes of just one more glimpse, one more image.

  And one day, he was there.

  If I hadn’t been so surprised and frozen on the spot, I would have given myself away. He was leaning up against the door, reading a book and looking so relaxed, he reminded me of stumbling across a doe grazing in a private glade that, instead of running, just looked up at you in curiosity. He had taken his shoes off and for some reason, seeing him barefoot was akin in my mind to catching him nude. He was so undeniably beautiful that the image was burned into my mind for the rest of my life.

  THAT image was the first thing that came to mind when I woke up the next morning and got ready to leave for Foster.

  I checked into my flight early, not wanting to be caught in a random airport pat down that would make me miss my flight. I could be brought up on terrorist charges, and I know my mom would find a way to say I did it on purpose just to get out of coming home for Christmas. One of the few perks of reviewing high-tech gadgets for a living was the free stuff you got from people wanting to see their product on our site. The tablet I was using was one of those perks. I sat at my gate and checked my e-mail as I waited.

  A short e-mail from Sophia wished me a good flight and said she was crossing her fingers for me to find a package of sex under the tree. She knew I was unhappy, had been unhappy, and was most likely going to continue being unhappy if nothing changed.

  WHEN I moved away from Foster, I’d been so sure that getting out was going to change everything. The truth was that there was no one to date in Nowhere, Texas. The only gay guy in town was the old man who ran the florist shop, and he acted more like a perv than an actual person. There was always talk by people of random hookups in the park, and once I even heard about a rest stop about ten miles out of town you could find sex at. Of course no one had seen this for themselves; like alligators in the sewers and people dying by saying Bloody Mary in front of a mirror, they were all just urban legends for Foster, and I needed more than that.

  I had dated girls in high school for the same reason I wore white T-shirts and rolled up the cuffs of my jeans; because it was what my brothers did. I dated an average-looking girl who knew dating one of the Wallace brothers was a step up in our little social circle. Since my brothers actually liked girls, they had already picked out the best-looking ones they could score. I was like Mrs. Abigail, my third period English teacher, picking out a new car; I didn’t much care what it looked like as long as it was reliable.

  And the girl had been reliable.

  She also had thought I was the sweetest guy on Earth, since I never tried to paw her and was neater than any three boys she knew. I remember her kissing me at the dance and me wondering how it would feel to kiss the boy behind the red door. I had caught him a few more times after school, alone, reading, silently contemplative as a Greek god. I’d die to know what it was he read, why he was alone, and if I would ever know his name.

  I’m not sure if this girl knew I liked guys, but she figured out quickly enough I didn’t like her. But she didn’t much care, and it became a de facto arrangement. She wore my class ring and said she was dating a Wallace boy. I had her ring on a chain so I could say I was dating a girl. We both got something out of it, but we both lost a lot more as it went on.

  “Sir,” a voice said as I was nudged.

  I opened my eyes and realized I had slept through takeoff and landing. It was just me and the nice flight attendant who, no doubt, wanted to get the drooling idiot off her plane so she could leave. She smiled and said, “We’ve landed sir.”

  “Thank you,” I mumbled. I pushed myself to my feet and was snapped back into my seat; the seat belt was still doing its job. I almost knocked the breath out of m
yself as I struggled to free myself from the belt and the embarrassment. The attendant reached down and opened it with one flick of her wrist. I grabbed my bag and slunk out of the plane with what little dignity I still possessed.

  After grabbing my luggage, I exited the terminal and was caught unprepared by how cold it was. Everyone likes to think Texas is a hot place, but no one who lives through a North Texas winter thinks that for long. North Texas is plains that run farther than the eye can see; and the winds cut across them and through clothes like a knife through butter. I half ran to catch the bus to the rental car lot and tried to breathe life into my hands as we drove. When I got into the car, I blasted the heater as far as it could and just waited for something that resembled warmth. By the time I’d finished shivering, the vents began to sputter out something that wasn’t cold air in my face. Still shivering because I’d grabbed the icy steering wheel, I put the car into gear and left the parking lot.

  Driving to Foster was like driving back in time, except I didn’t have to go eighty-eight miles an hour or have that crazy guy from Taxi yelling at me all the time.