It was the cold tag end of winter. Valentine's Day was close, and that means spring will arrive soon. In this part of the country. But, so far, there was still snow on the ground and the temperatures hovered around the freezing mark. Mary had come to see me at my university apartment. I had fixed her and myself some tea. There was soft rock on the Ipod. We were sitting on the brown hand me down sofa I had bought at the thrift shop. There was a large window, in front of us, and the small TV on a stand to the right of it. The sun glared in now and then, so I closed the curtains a little tighter.
We were talking of classes and professors and the end of semester, what we would do on our breaks, anything. Me close to the edge of the right, she close to the edge of the left, of the sofa that sagged a bit in the middle, that was propped up haphazardly with a stack of schoolbooks.
"Tim," she said, the tea having gotten tepid, of she had drunk little of it, and now placed it on the scarred coffee table from that same thrift shop, "you know I'm a Lesbian, don't you?"
My stomach shuddered. I had been hoping always to avoid this. To be friends. To go to movies with her and Dianne and our other friends. She had been married once, and though we were both reaching tenured positions on the faculty, still she looked young, still her hair was blonde, still her face was porcelain seeming, with no lines of age, even the tell tale beginnings of them. I knew she was my last chance at sexuality. I knew that with her rested love. And there it began and ended. I now knew it was ending. It was easy for me, and I smiled later, thinking of that phrase I had unwittingly stolen from Mike Hammer—"it was easy, baby." But that was when Hammer had killed the femme fatale. Not me, trying to save a friendship of over two years, getting closer and closer. Diane was a good person and I found myself feeling utterly foolish being jealous of them.
I had spent most of my life, which really had not begun till I had started university as a freshman, as the proverbial third wheel. I never liked it. But my roommate was a nice guy and he had a girlfriend and we palled around together. Then there was a friend I met in theatre and she had had a boyfriend, and we had become friends. But I was always like a puppy dog. I had learned suppression. I had learned to take what was given to me, and be quiet about it. No one had ever been sure about me, if anyone had ever wondered, but in Mary's eyes, I had seen love, and her heart was my heart. So we sat in the too warm apartment, our coats on the bed, me wearing a heavy sweater and thick jeans and boots, and she in almost the same accoutrements. I put down the tea and waited.
"It's hard enough with Toby," she said, referring to her son. "It's not easy having two moms, though he's had us for seven years." She was facing forward, bent over a bit, silent between bites of words. "I mean," and she looked at me for a moment, then turned away again, "I never led you on, you know. I led Toby on though. I always told him, when he was very young, that he would have a new Dad, that divorce did not mean the world's end for him." She sighed and shrugged helplessly. "I was such a coward. I always kept it hidden about Dianne, who was a peach, and who understood. And in time I had to tell him. He's this liberal kid, all the right records, all the right politics, and all the right writers. He knows what to say and what not to say. But he's never accepted this. I never led you on."
I put my own cup down next to hers, far away from hers. "I know, Mary. I've never not known. I have always accepted you with Dianne. I" (helplessly) "know."
She didn't have to say she was ending our friendship. She didn't have to say anything at all. I would see her on campus, on the quad, between classes, in the hallway, nodding at her perfunctorily, and it truly was my own fault. But then, how could I have done it any other way? It was all I knew. And there was Erica. And there was Erica. It was pretty ridiculous sounding. Who the hell is named Erica, other than soap opera actresses? But Erica had latched onto me this past semester, and I had her in class this term too. She was somehow in love with me. She was tall and gaunt and hollow eyed. She never seemed to be anything but darkly dressed, with ivory pale, verging on, sickly bone white skin. She had done what had never been done to me before. She scared me to death, truthfully. I could not wait to get away from her. It was, however nice in its way, harrowing.
She looked at me in class, stared at me, talked to me, invited me to the Hearth, for a cup of coffee and a sandwich, she acknowledged my existence, not as a part of others, not as a third wheel, but me alone. Mary had her in a class an hour later than mine. Mary said Erica (was it indeed her real name? Or borrowed from the heaths of the likes of Wuthering Height's love loaded denizens?, and the eighteenth century, all crammed with dying for love and not feeling robbed by it; all those crannies of words that strained into maudlin sentimentality and prose indistinct the words were smudged by so much purple?) talked about me with her, knowing Mary and I were friends-what books did I like?,when was my birthday?, was I straight?, was I interested in her; did I ever talk about her with Mary? What was I? What would be a great Christmas gift? And the flurry of questions Mary tried to calm down, to say she really didn't know, we were just acquaintances and she would have to ask me herself.
Embarrassingly, frizzy haired dark midnight haired Erica had become a joke between Mary, Dianne and me. Especially awful of me because I had always been a joke like that, when the other two of my party were away from me, and sometimes when they were with me, the little hurtful words, the little pitying glances, the knowing that I would spend my life masturbating alone and thinking my nothing thoughts in a nothing land the world had little to do with, for I never expressed myself, always hid, always did what I felt others wanted me to do, and when they wanted me to go away, I did so. But this time, Mary, this time, please let me not go away.
Mary was talking as I came back to the surface, almost, for a moment, thinking I was alone and she had gone away, how horribly easy it is to get used to this kind of thing, and how horribly difficult it is to stop the pattern, to be what is tolerated for a time and then not. She was telling me how Toby liked to play football with me in the arena when no one else was around, how the boy was shy because he was himself and that was not the thing to be, because he had a Lesbian for a mother and another one for a Father, and one time, they had caught him peeking in their bedroom late night, when they were fucking. Mary was ashamed and covered up her entire body with the quilt. Dianne pulled on a nightgown and screamed at him to get out now, this instant.
