When someone you haven't even spoken to for most of a year turns up on your doorstep on a Sunday evening, a fat duffel bag dangling from one hand and a laptop clutched in the other, it can disturb your plans a little.
Paul was a former colleague a few years older than I am. He and I had worked in the same department for a few months. We were never more than office-friends, people who'd smile at one another in the corridor and exchange the sort of casual chat you'd hear around any water cooler. When he went to pursue visions of sugarplums at a San Francisco startup that had offered him a piece of the company, I wished him well, but thought no more about it. Most such ventures fail pretty quickly. Not that I had any interest in or expectation of following him there; as I said before, we were no more than cordial coworkers. I
certainly
never expected him to appear on my threshold, hoping for a place to stay.
"Hi, Minh," he said. "Do you think you could put up with me for a few days while I get myself sorted out?"
Not knowing what to say--not being perfectly certain what was proper--I beckoned him in and waved him at the sofa. He dropped his bag at his feet, seated himself, and hunched forward, awaiting the quizzing he knew he was about to get.
I assumed that "crash" is what his startup had done. It was a saddening thought. He'd told me before his departure about the company's product concept: a system that would analyze the interaction between custom integrated circuits entirely from their designs, so that a circuit board based on the eventual chips would enter the world far more reliable than they usually do. As startup ideas go, it was one of the more promising ones I'd heard. That shouldn't be taken as a measure of anything; I'm only twenty-six years old and have only had one job. I was curious about why the company had failed.
I didn't trouble to hide my curiosity. He did his best to talk around the subject, which only made me more determined to know what had happened. In a perfect demonstration of positive feedback, the harder I pressed him, the more resistance he exhibited.
Eventually I realized the futility of my efforts and backed off.
"Have you had any dinner?" I said.
He shook his head. "On the road all day."
I wasn't about to take him out to dinner. Either I'd wind up paying for the two of us, which would embarrass him, or he'd insist on splitting the check, which would embarrass me.
"Well, I haven't got much in the fridge. Grilled cheese sandwiches okay with you?"
He nodded. I headed to my little kitchen and went to work.
Fifteen minutes later we were chowing down on greasy sandwiches and a side of greasier potato chips when out of the blue he said, "Sex."
"Huh?"
"That's what made me leave Jackrabbit."
I peered at him. "What, you were all having too much office sex to get any work done?"
His face twitched. "Not...all of us."
I wasn't sure I wanted to hear any more about it, but the little devil at the back of my skull sure did.
"Don't leave me hanging, Paul. What was the problem? Did all the office romances get in the way, did someone get really pissed about being left out and start trashing things, what?"
He looked away. I waited.
Presently he said "San Francisco is different."
"Yeah, a lot of ways. So?"
"Sexually, I mean."
Oh. "There were problems because some of your coworkers were gay?"
He locked eyes with me and shook his head. "Not quite," he said. "Because two of us weren't."
Well! I hadn't expected that, though maybe I should have. "Out of how many?"
"There were twelve of us. "Ten gay, two straight."
"All male?"
He nodded.
I hadn't known Paul well, but he'd never struck me as the sort who'd make trouble over other people's sexual orientations. Especially when he was heavily outnumbered. So I leaped to the opposite assumption and decided to let the subject drop. After a moment's silence, we returned to our vein-cloggers.
We'd finished our sandwiches and I was clearing the table when he spoke again.
"The company's still there," he said. "I had to get away from it to get it all sorted out. The pressure to...conform was something else."
That halted me in my tracks. "They actually tried to...
convert
you?" It sounded too bizarre for words.
He shook his head again. "No, Minh. It was the other way around. I couldn't stop feeling that I was an outsider--that I couldn't be one of the gang unless I was...one
with
the gang. You know. In the bars and the bathhouses."
"But you're straight," I murmured.
He lowered his eyes to the table. "I hope so. I'm not sure anymore."
***
No Dodger ever faced a curve ball with that much of a break on it. I took the dishes to the kitchen and washed them as if I were trying to wear holes through them. I scrubbed them until my hands started to shake, and then I dried them and started looking for anything else to do that would be a good excuse for not returning to my living room and keeping my unexpected guest company. That effort ran down pretty quickly.
Don't let anyone tell you different: there isn't a straight man on Earth who doesn't harbor at least some doubts about himself. Especially now that the gays are so in-your-face about it. The way they prance around can make it seem as if their side of the street is easier, more fun, even somehow more natural. And I can see at least one thing about it that is a little easier to cope with than heterosexuality.
Women can be a real trial: bitchy, demanding, erratic, even cruel. We're never straightforward. We often expect men to read our minds and treat them like naughty little kids when they don't get it right. We tend to be at our worst toward the men who show an interest in us and try to get us interested in them. Take it from a member of the species.
I could see it in myself. I thought of it as Bad Minh, a second personality that lived in the dark corners of my skull. I didn't like her, never had, tried to keep her locked down tight, but she was there. Every now and then Bad Minh would slip her leash despite everything and leave a mess for Good Minh to clean up afterward.
It never occurred to me that the prospect of not having to cope with us ladies and our little ways might constitute an attraction to the other side of the fence. Wasn't sexual orientation supposed to be inborn? At least, that's what I'd heard.
Maybe I heard wrong. Or maybe I wasn't listening to the right people. Hard to say.
You can get a lot of stuff wrong if you just accept what you're told. Most people know very little, and most of it about a very narrow range of subjects. That doesn't keep their mouths closed about stuff they know nothing about, though.
Why had Paul brought his issues to me? We'd never been romantically entangled. I had no idea whether he found me attractive...but then, I couldn't have said why he came to me looking for a place to stay.
What was I supposed to do with him?
I didn't know that, either.
***
The next few days were pretty routine. I headed out to work each morning; Paul went "pounding the virtual pavement," cruising the Web looking for job openings anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area. It wasn't a boom time for the region, but it wasn't terrible, especially for an engineer with a few years' experience. I expected him to turn up a few possibilities at the major job-hunters' sites, and maybe a few more through people who remembered him approvingly from before his sojourn north.
I also expected him to talk about what he'd found. He didn't. I considered whether it would be intrusive to ask him how it was going, decided it would probably sound like I wanted to be rid of him, and suppressed the urge.
He was tolerable company, even pleasant. But as the days passed and his silence accumulated I began to wonder whether he was making any progress at all. I hadn't signed up for a roommate in perpetuity...and I still hadn't figured out why he'd come specifically to me.
On the eleventh day after his arrival at my door, as we sat to another of the Spartan dinners I'd been preparing for us, I finally worked up courage enough to broach the subject.
"How's the job hunt going? Any possibilities?"
Paul nodded but said nothing.
"Has anyone invited you to an interview yet?"
"Yeah. Actually, I went to one last Thursday."
He didn't look happy about it.
"Not a good fit, huh?"
He grimaced and stared down at his Greek salad.
All the warning signs were up, and for a change I decided to respect them.
Presently he said "I didn't impress them. I couldn't concentrate on what the interviewer was saying. I couldn't get the...other thing out of my head."
Ouch. "This is turning out to be that much of a struggle?"
Pain washed over his features. "I honestly don't know, Minh. That's the hell of it. I started to feel a pull toward one of the other guys, and it scared the hell out of me. I don't know whether it was natural to feel an attraction, or natural to feel scared, or whether the whole mess was just because I hadn't had a regular date since moving to San Fran, or what. I was almost unable to think about anything else. I wasn't pulling my weight, that's for sure."
He looked up at me in obvious pain...and with an equally obvious plea.
I took a moment to wonder
why me?
As I said, we'd never been more than casually friendly, office mates whose proximity required a certain amount of impersonal comradeship. He'd never asked me out. He'd never shown any interest in me romantically. In fact, we'd never even sat to lunch together. But here he was, baring his soul to me, and for the life of me I couldn't imagine why.
It took me a few seconds more to conclude that the
why
simply didn't matter. Paul needed to know what he was, and I was the investigator he'd assigned to the case. Either I was going to help--to try to help, anyway--or I was going to leave him as he was.
Deedee tells me I'm a soft touch for a stray. Maybe so. But if that's me, so be it. I wasn't about to rewrite myself just because this particular stray was unexpected. Aren't they all?
We were near enough to finished with our salads that I decided to move. I rose, waited for Paul to notice, and looked directly into his eyes.
"Come with me."
He rose without speaking and followed me to my bedroom.
