"This isn't the best timing, Alicia," Jerome Barkin said. He stood in the frame of the open sliding glass door out onto the patio and swimming pool of the house he shared with the movie star, Todd Lad, on the Mesa Verde Golf Course, in the Los Angeles suburb of Huntington Beach. Todd, his husband of nearly three years and, pushing fifty now, a good ten years older than Jerome, was stretched out on a pool bed in the altogether. He was still looking good, looking no older than Jerome did, as a matter of fact, despite his age. But then Jerome was a studio scriptwriter, not a star, so he didn't have to work at looking like a movie star. That he did so was due to naturally good genes.
"Is that why you haven't returned my calls for over a week?" Jerome's former wife retorted icily across the airwaves.
"I've been busy," Jerome answered. "We're heavily into rewrites on
South of Eden
and I have this anniversary coming up and a party to put on to celebrate it."
"Ah, yes, your anniversary with Todd Lad. The seventh, is it?"
"The third. You know it couldn't be the seventh, Alicia. We were still married seven years ago."
"I could have believed you were already married to him then."
"Don't be catty, Alicia. Tell me why you have been calling. What do you want?" She wouldn't be calling him if there wasn't something she wanted. She always wanted more. She'd made out better in the settlement than he had--mostly because she wasn't really that wrong about Todd. He and Todd had started up while he and Alicia were still married, and Todd was very much a public figure. So, to keep her quiet in the divorce, she'd made out extremely well. Even Todd had kicked in on that. Of course, it was Todd who was being protected by her silence.
And of course Alicia was calling him because she wanted something, although she didn't want it for herself and it wasn't something she approved of. She just never said no to the nineteen-year-old son, Jamie, who was the reason she and Jerome had had to get married at eighteen--far too young for either of them to have known who they were at the time. In Jerome's case, that was catastrophic, because when he realized who he was, it wasn't to be married to a woman at all. He discovered too late that he was gay.
Once again, he had to tell Alicia on the phone that the timing for what she was asking was just impossible. "We're in the middle of this anniversary thing, Alicia. This would be the worse time for Jamie to come to the West Coast." Alicia and their son currently lived in Atlanta's Buckhead suburb, where Alicia had a successful interior design studio and Jamie had been a star athlete in high school. He was in a community college now and had gotten the acting bug. And therein lay the rub. He wanted to use his connections in Hollywood to become a movie star. He's already enrolled in an acting school in L.A., and he wanted to come out and live with his father.
"You're his father," Alicia said. "It's time for you to take him for a while." Because of Jerome's situation, he'd been flying to Atlanta three or four times a year to see Jamie there. He had always tried to show up at the most important points in the young man's life.
"You got all of the money to support him, Alicia. And you're the one who didn't want him to be around me as long as Todd and I were together." As a matter of fact, Jerome didn't think it would be healthy for a nineteen-year-old boy to be living with a gay male couple either, even if they
were
married. Nothing would go wrong in relationships, of course, Jerome believed--but the way it would look to the outside world couldn't help but tarnish the world's view of Jerome's son.
"It's your turn not to be catty, Darling," Alicia said. "You don't think I want this to happen, do you? This is Jamie. You know how adamant he is about getting what he wants. He's got the acting bug. He's coming out to Los Angeles to go to acting school whether we support it or not."
"And he insists on staying here? With Todd and me?"
"At least until and unless you find him someplace else decent and appropriate to stay and cover the costs. I'm paying for the acting school. You can jolly well cover his living costs."
"When does he plan to come out to the coast?" Jerome asked.
"The day after tomorrow."
"That soon? Fuck. That doesn't give me enough time to find someplace he can move right into. You could have--"
"If you'd called me back last week, you'd have had more time. As it is, you can figure it out." She then gave Jerome the date, time, and flight number of his son's appearance and rang off. As soon as she was gone, another call was coming in--from the caterer for their anniversary party in three weeks' time, and Jerome didn't even have a moment to panic over having both his husband and his son living in the house together for even a day.
What Jerome knew that Alicia didn't unless their son had fessed up to her in the last month, which Jerome thought unlikely, was that Jamie had come out to Jerome. His son was gay, and after any time living here with Jerome and Todd and then coming out as gay, Jerome knew that Alicia would climb right up the wall and accuse him and Todd of turning her precious boy. Jerome didn't care if the boy was gay. Good on him for having discovered that much earlier than Jerome had and for being so reconciled to it. But it didn't help the situation one bit--not when he was coming here.
The timing was definitely off. An anniversary party was coming up, which would be predominated by other gays; Todd and he were having a bit of a difficult patch as it was--Todd was showing boredom with the monogamous aspect of marriage--and Jamie was dropping in on them no doubt expecting to start a whole new life out from underneath Alicia's thumb and progressed Jerome had no idea how far into a gay lifestyle.
There were so many ways this could go wrong. Jerome didn't even want to contemplate how it could go wrong with his relationship with Todd. But he couldn't put that out of his mind. If only Todd didn't have a roving eye for younger men.
* * * *
"Hadn't you best get dressed. We're already late for the studio party."
"I don't really feel like going, Jer. I think I'll skip this and just do an early to bed."
That didn't sound a bit like Todd Lad, the original party boy. Jerome had found the movie star, only in shorts and sandals, by the barbecue pit on the pool terrace of their Mesa Verde Club house, still lingering over dinner with Jerome's son, Jamie, who, in a Speedo, looked like he'd just come out of the pool. They were drinking beer, sitting close together, laughing, and looking at their demolished steak plates. Jerome had eaten dinner with them--indeed, he had fixed dinner for them--but had moved on more than an hour and a half earlier.
Jerome had met his nineteen-year-old son at the appointed time at the airport, but he almost had failed to recognize him. Jamie obviously was intent on making a stab at this acting thing, after years of not showing much interest in anything but football, basketball, soccer, and tennis, which had sculpted his body beautifully. He hadn't even shown interest in girls, despite being a heartthrob even in his most sloppy and sweaty phases. Of course, now Jerome knew why there had been a lack of interest in girls. He was still wondering if Alicia knew Jamie had declared gay. Maybe she did and that's why she'd cut the apron springs and sent him out to California.
He had certainly cleaned up to the part of matinee idol now, though. He'd always been a well-muscled kid, from his athletic activities, but Jerome decided he must have added bodybuilding and a physical trainer--maybe one of Alicia's guys she turned to when turning away from Jerome--to his routine. Now he had a magnificently cut body for his age. He'd also frosted his hair and had started to pay attention to his wardrobe. Jerome had been skeptical of this plan to come out here and go to acting school, no less because Jamie hadn't seemed to apply himself to anything other than sports up to this point. But seeing him arrive in the airport put Jerome on notice that his son had arrived on the California scene as well. Everyone gawked at him at the airport as if he already was a movie star.
And, as far as application, Jamie surprised Jerome there too. He'd already made all of the arrangements with the acting school--or perhaps Alicia had--which was within a short scooter ride of the Mede Verde Club house, and by the way he latched into Todd when they got back to the house, the young man obviously already had a plan to use the established movie star to help him break into the movies as well. Todd had helped by going as gaga over Jamie as everyone had done at the airport.
For the two weeks Jamie had been there, settling in, the two--the aging, established action thriller movie star and the young wannabe one as well--had become inseparable, with Todd uncharacteristically staying out of the social whirl when he usually was the center of it and, when he couldn't avoid going out with Jerome, taking Jamie with them as well.
Jerome could see where this inevitably was going and he tried to stop it, spending a good deal of his time trying to find other living arrangements that he could afford and that would entice Jamie to move on, but thus far that effort had just pulled him away from where the other two were making up to each other.
Todd and Jerome did have an open marriage, but it was more open for Todd than it was for Jerome, and Jerome had had hopes of it toning down to just the two of them as they both got older. That's what the coming anniversary party was supposed to bring to Todd's mind--the commitment they had declared.
Todd had claimed that was what he wanted as well, and he'd been moving in that direction until Jamie appeared on the scene. Jerome hadn't figured out how to prevent this situation from flaming up until it was too late to do so. He tried talking to Todd, but the man was into denial and said he was just helping Jamie because he was Jerome's son. And Jerome believed that Todd just didn't see through Jamie--didn't see that Jamie was using him to get what he wanted out of Hollywood. He was obviously cultivating the older actor to latch on to his Hollywood network.
Jerome was too upset with his son about this to talk to him. Instead, he took advantage of all of the parties the three went to to direct Jamie toward someone he could use to more success than Todd. Maybe then he'd leave his dad's husband alone.
Of course there always was the possibility that Jamie was doing this to punish his dad for, in his eyes, abandoning him. But Jamie was, in fact, easily redirected to other gay men at parties, and had become, even in just two weeks, a slut with them, so there was hope that Jerome's redirection scheme would work.
But he ran out of time, and Jamie being a slut attracted, rather than repelled, Todd's interest.
