Single Gay Uncle - A Short Story In Two Parts

If you’re just catching up: this story first appeared in the now-defunct and much missed Tin House literary journal as “The Insincere House” in 2014 but it has never had a life online. I decided to revise it, change the title and publish it here. It is too long to fit in a single newsletter, thus it is here in two parts. Part 1 appeared last week.

April 1986 cover of Japanese gay magazine Samson.

Jack finishes unpacking and then examines the two twin beds in the upstairs bedroom he’s chosen, looking for the person-shaped depressions that seasons of renters might have left. He has seen them mostly in hotels, felt the way the side of the bed nearest the bathroom develops a groove he can feel along his shoulders, his thighs. But these markless mattresses seem new.

An image comes of Brian reclining on the bed, hands on his chest, looking back at him. Naked, pale, amused. Jack blinks, horrified, and the apparition does leave. And then he does too, walking back into the rest of the house.

Brian would have been a bad fit, was a bad fit, he reminds himself, as he heads downstairs to his computer. Jack’s family would have been polite perhaps, would have maybe appreciated that he spoke and read French, or that he could cook so well. It would have been a big deal to bring him but everyone would have acted as if it was ordinary, at least in front of the two of them. But he would not have fit in, and not just for being gay like Jack or the only white man, something that would have felt a little uncanny. His brothers had both married Korean American women, something Jack had never reflected on until he’d considered bringing Brian. Brian who is, he keeps reminding himself, not someone he knew, but a stranger who hid in a disguise in their relationship, until he was caught.

Brian would never come now, never be at this vacation, never meet Jack’s parents. He would not play puzzles with his in-laws, would not befriend his brothers’ wives so they could text about the brothers. And he would not sneak out of the rental house to have sex with someone Jack didn’t know, some stranger he met online.

It is in fact Jack’s turn for that.

He sits down at the kitchen table and opens his computer, finds the rental’s wireless signal, goes online. He signs into Manhunt and as always finds the greeting window ridiculous, with the sultry pouting shirtless men looking at him.

Gay life, when you get down to it, is an eternal game of shirts against skins. There are the men who always have shirtless photos and the ones who never will. He is a shirt. And like many of the shirts, he wants to be a skin.

He clicks “enter”, and when the profile window opens, he changes his location to Maine. 37,653 members online, it says in a corner window. In his mind they briefly become an enormous cloud, like the ones outside the window moving up into the sky, naked, entwined, but in a numbed or even frozen embrace, as if all at once they’ve fallen asleep in a naked pile they might for the opening scene of an impossible musical number. He peruses the profiles—192 ads for southern Maine—and wonders about the lives of the men here. Especially the couples online cruising for dates, those he alternately wonders about and envies. The gay marriage party is maybe here, but it is different—couples on the prowl. Is it fun for them or anxiety producing, he wonders. He wants to know, to have this problem. The idea of being a couple that goes out looking for sex together has always struck him as one of the friendliest propositions he could imagine. To him, the sad irony even now of his relationship with Brian is that he’d asked Brian for an open relationship, something Brian vehemently denied him, needing instead to enact an in-house theatrical production in which Jack was a cuckolded spouse from the mid-twentieth century. Whatever Brian had needed, he needed to do it apart from Jack, in secret, hiding something from him—that was part of the kink.

Illustration by Shon

He made the profile in the summer after the break-up. The agonizing over the taking of selfies, over whether or not to post nudes, a photograph of his penis. The most awkward photo shoot of his life ensued, the least sexy experience. Was this what he looked like? And worse, the resulting collage on his profile, the way he felt turned into parts. And the dick shot. Multiple ones, and he deletes the others he doesn’t use, which feels terrible in some way no one had ever explained it might. How do you warn someone about that which can never be spoken of? And even worse, he hated how he felt after he first posted the profile. To feel made into an Asian American gay man displaying a penis in these forums, vulnerable to being judged within the context of sexual racism. Even the violence that was fearing being told he was “big for an Asian.” Or of just never knowing what someone thought. But he had gone through with it. He was still on that trip, wherever it took him, in this boat made from his body and put into this electronic river.

He wonders sometimes if he’ll see Brian on here, but he never has.

Mail begins to fill his inbox. Of the profiles he’s browsing, no one has really taken his imagination yet so he checks his inbox, and he sees a message from “Chris27.” Pix unlocked! Why has the Internet brought back the exclamation point, he wonders as he pushes on the link, and then he has his answer.

Chris is a handsome young white man who seems to like every perverse thing. A picture of him naked in a sling has him laughing, as if it is a skit, while men stand poised around him, prepared to violate him. In the photos, he smiles prettily as these men do what are commonly considered the unspeakable things to him. He wears a silver metal cock ring and nothing else in most of the photos. The photos also have a kind of time line to them, a narrative, where in the first ones he looks happy, puckish and younger, a cigarette in his mouth, shirtless, smiling. And in the last, he stares blankly into what one can only assume is the computer, naked, except for the chromed jewelry on his penis.

What’s up, the e-mail reads.

Jack looks at it for a moment And then he types back, What’s up? And hits “send.”

* * *

“Well,” he says to his middle brother, Robert, over the phone, “it’s all right, as houses go. I mean, it’s clean.”

He says this as he drives to Portland to meet the man he now thinks of as “Internet Chris.” Robert is still in traffic, over the border near Portsmouth, a few miles behind Teddy and the booze. Jack is thrilled they are late. He wants to have sex and get back to the rental before everyone else arrives. If he can do this one thing, it seems, maybe everything will be different, and by everything he means literally everything in his life after this point. It has become some of the most important casual sex he might ever have.

“Teddy isn’t there?” Robert asks.

“No, not yet, but almost. He’s near Kittery.”

“And you’re headed to Portland?”

“Yes,” he says. “I miss Portland.”

While this part is true, he can tell his brother is refraining from asking a question. What Jack is doing is out of the ordinary pattern of their visits, in every way.

“Is Mom there yet?” Robert asks.

“I don’t think so. If she is, she hasn’t called.” He does not mention that he hasn’t called her either.

A text message ring comes from his phone as he talks. He looks at the phone briefly. Mom? Internet Chris? He knows his brother heard it, is even waiting to hear if it is from their mom. A silence comes between them that is always there when one of them is lying to the other and neither is going to say anything about it.

“When do you think you’ll get up here?” Jack asks him finally.

“Who even knows, dude. I’ll call you when I’m closer. The traffic is a big problem,” Robert says.

“Cool. Okay, well, call me.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

The text is in fact from Internet Chris and says, Almost. There handsome. He smiles at it even as the illiteracy of it irks. He doesn’t want to be reminded he is doing something that is possibly beneath him somehow. He doesn’t even want it to be beneath him. He wants it to be right on his level. If it is beneath him he wants to descend and never ascend again, never return to whatever height this is again.

Somehow, in the past, each time he came home here to where he grew up, he always lost the feeling of this part of himself. It went to ground, leaving him neutered, a genderless creature who listlessly helps out his brothers’ two families and has no sexuality. Every now and then he might see something--say, a handsome man at the beach--and the faintest ripple of desire will disturb the placid surface of his mind, and then it will be gone.

He doesn’t want this to happen again, ever. He feels starved on the heels of his breakup with Brian, in the grip of an appetite for sex, a storm of sex, for something intense, for anything, anything to erase that numbness, that premonition of death. And so he is driving to Portland. There is a handsome boy waiting to be defiled, smiling up as he is defiled. Practically cheering about it and incapable of being truly defiled, even perhaps made somehow sacred by offering himself up to all that depredation and desire, and Jack is tired, tired of all the rest of his past now, the long confusion, the loneliness. All he wants is a man standing naked wearing a ring on his dick, maybe some boots, and that is all.

Definitely boots, actually. He would ask Chris about the boots.

Internet Chris, somehow, is the boy of his dreams.

* * *

They meet at a bar on Congress St. in Portland. The Snug, across from a graveyard. He waits inside. Chris comes late, having sent a few more text messages along the way, and then he makes Jack wait just a little longer while he finishes a cigarette outside that he waves through the window at Jack, as if they’ve known each other for years.

He is shorter in person than Jack expected. But also, somehow, even more adorable. Chris is positively kittenish, touching him, running his hands up and down him in the bar. Jack has the impulse to pet him, to rub him under his chin.

They talk. First about Vermont: Chris spent the weekend there with friends, having sex in the woods with strangers. He tells a long story about being naked with another naked guy who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Chris had to actually say, Don’t touch me. Jack had never done anything like this and this problem is so unexpected, for someone is to his mind a sexual athlete, Jack feels a surge of . . . is it love? A crush. He stands at a distance from himself as the crush organizes itself in his mind. They could go into the woods of Vermont together and have sex with strangers together or alone and he’d keep Chris safe from the guys who couldn’t respect a boundary. He’d be able to say what Chris couldn’t. Then they would leave the woods and go home and have more sex.

And that is when he remembers Brian. It is as if he gave up drinking and found himself awake at the fridge, vodka in hand.

Chris finishes whatever story he was telling, looks back up at him, and smiles.

* * *

Brian had made a confession to Jack early in their relationship that Jack had set aside, as if it were only inconvenient. “I can’t enjoy sex unless I’m being forced,” Brian said. “I can’t enjoy it unless I can tell the other person doesn’t want me to enjoy it.”

“So I should.. ?” he asked. He didn’t want to finish the question. They were in bed together, quiet after sex. He was in the full heat of his infatuation with Brian, determined to make anything work, no matter how strange or horrible. This seemed to make all he wanted with Brian impossible. Now he wonders if it was deliberate, Brian trying to push him away.

“No,” Brian said. “It won’t work if I know you’re just trying to please me.”

He didn’t ask any questions then. He didn’t ask Brian to tell him why this was true, or if it was related to some trauma. Brian had said it in an even voice, no tears, just complete self-accepting calm. It may have been the one time he told Jack the truth.

This was the source for advice he now gave to friends: there is always something you tell yourself that won’t matter at the beginning of a relationship, and that is what always becomes the only thing that matters.

He never told his family about the reasons for the breakup, and he also never told Brian, either. He simply broke it off between them. He’d discovered he had crabs a few weeks into a trip Brian took, and, left at home with an STD, as he waited for the lotion he’d bought to soak in, he pulled the sheets off the bed to begin the laundry and, on a hunch, pushed the bed back from the wall, where he discovered a card he didn’t recognize, with a phone number scrawled on the back. The name was a man Brian had never mentioned, and he wondered if it had fallen there in the scrum.

Brian had once given him his password, he remembered, and so he went to see if he could log into Brian’s e-mail. He could. He did.

He spent the better part of an afternoon reading. What he found there was like a novel told from characters with different points of view, though they were all, technically, Brian. Brian had sex with someone that time Jack left him alone to browse in a bookstore during their recent trip to Montreal and he had also carried on some kind of affair with the editor of an academic journal he met at a conference in Atlanta; he had also found at least two people locally, in New York, in their Brooklyn neighborhood. But this was all more or less fine in Jack’s mind. Worse were the strangers he met for bareback sex, people Brian corresponded with only a few times, or how he sent them photos of himself from when he was much younger and thinner, using Internet aliases and seemingly fake personalities. Play-acting at being tougher or more submissive. It would have been easier if it had been just one passionate affair, easier to be hurt, but in the mad rush of people, in the apparent stampede, and with the way he was telling each of the correspondents something different about himself and his life and his choices, what Jack felt by the end, more than anger or even grief, was pity.

At least at first.

He found an exchange between Brian and the academic editor where they were laughing at him, mocking Jack for being so sexually conventional. Jack thought of Brian’s anger when Jack suggested the open relationship, the long fight the suggestion had provoked. It would have been easy to be angry about that, to call Brian a hypocrite, but, instead, what he’d felt next was fear.

Jack logged off Brian’s e-mail, closed his computer, and went for a long run. And then, after the run, he went to his local clinic for an HIV test. When Brian called him from the road later, he was friendly, seemingly “himself.” Jack struggled through. And of course he would be. All at once Brian’s self-presentation, the sunny self that had just called was gone, and in its place was someone he thought of as the changeling, who was in fact the true Brian, telling him who he was underneath it all. The changeling was the one who had lied to him, had written all of these emails to strangers, and who’d made sure Jack had the password to the account. The changeling was the one who had given him crabs, from whoever he’d had sex with elsewhere. The changeling was setting him up for something he couldn’t see, even now, something he would never see as long as he was looking at the Brian he thought he knew.

As Jack contemplated what he had to do next, it was a feeling the size of a cruise ship, and at the top of it, on a deck far away, was Jack, leaving, waving at him as he went. Brian staying behind.

“I don’t know how I’ll feel about this,” Brian said when Jack broke up with him over the phone.

“You’ll figure it out,” Jack said, surprised at his own bluntness, and then hung up.

Of all the things Brian could have said, there was something so sad and lonely about the idea that he wouldn’t know how he felt about this. Jack could still hear him, the querulous tone of his voice, as if the moment it happened was a place Jack could walk back to across the time and distance and find Brian right there, still confused, some of his various selves arguing about whether they still loved Jack or not.

But wherever Brian is now, Jack lives in a place where the only person who knows the truth is his therapist, though of course his therapist doesn’t know all of it. He thought this silence around the breakup would be fine, but instead the result is that he now feels like a ghost in his own life, unreal to himself and to others. A ghost who inhabits some sort of romantic erotic limbo, the world around him paling swiftly. This must end.

Romantic Old Soul. How long then, to burn here, for whatever it is he hasn’t learned?

* * *

He drives through the dark from the Snug, following Internet Chris to a second location, his home. He could be a smiling killer, of course. But chances are he is not. Chances are he is at least a fun lay.

“Park here,” Chris says, pointing to the curb. He turns and hits his clicker and his car garage door closes, Chris walking insouciantly away as Jack finishes parking, as if he is a spoiled teenager, the one who’s finally won Mommy and Daddy over in his argument. He follows Chris upstairs to find the apartment full of noise, a television show on at high volume and a pug dog running and jumping, yipping.

“My landlady’s deaf!” Chris yells at Jack over the sound. “She lives downstairs and can’t hear a fucking thing!” He giggles. “Chelsea Handler’s my favorite,” Chris says, then hops on his bed. “I fucking love her.” He whips off his shirt and pants until he is wearing just a cock ring. His body is slim, well-muscled, his nipples somehow friendly. He looks anxious and Jack slowly takes in that his cock is already erect, thanks to the efforts of the cock ring, but it is small. He is hung like a classical statue.

Jack had been so distracted by the TV and the name Chelsea Handler. So this is the Chelsea Handler show? he thought and started watching it before remembering why he is there. Oh God. He probably thinks I’m judging him, Jack realizes, and undoes his shirt. The blare of the television continues. And I am. I’m judging him for not turning off the TV. Is he going to keep this on the whole time? Of all the perversions displayed on Chris’s profile, this one seems the kinkiest somehow. He wants to joket about i, but even the possible humor drains away in the ache of loneliness reverberating through the room. To live with the television on at this volume, even when you’re not home.

In the light coming off the TV, he knows something new. Brian was some freakish amalgam of every mistake he’s ever made with a man. He still hasn’t really been with anyone in a way that matters since Ted, his ex before Brian. The sex with Brian had been good, even if he was technically a fictional character at the time it happened, conjured for whatever scam he was pulling with Jack, but what Jack misses is the electric haywire wildness that had Jack and Ted still having breakup sex years after they’d broken up, stubbornly missing so far from his whole life after Ted. Such that he wonders still if that breakup was a mistake, if there wasn’t some way he could have tolerated Ted’s narcissism, if he could have just warmed himself somehow on the heat of the sex instead. But they’d had their time, they know each other too well to be together now. He knew it the last time he saw Ted, at a roof party, with a new boyfriend in tow. Ted pulling the sort of emotional stunt Jack recognized instantly but that the new boyfriend did not. Better you than me, he’d silently said to the new man across the way. But now each time he reaches for someone, he wonders, Will this be it? Where is it, where is the next explosion of heat and light that will annihilate what I am feeling, that will turn all this ash back to what it was before?

Already he can feel what excitement he felt for Chris is slipping away as the television glow and blare suffuse them. The giant face of Chelsea Handler talks to her guests on the huge digital screen behind him, all also giant-faced, as if it is all broadcast from a land where people are much larger, laughing and snarking. The colors of her and her guests spread across the bodies of Jack and Chris, the TV the only light in the room, until it feels like trying to have sex in a sad celebrity kaleidoscope.

You love her this much, Jack thinks, as he kneels on the bed. He bends down and begins with a kiss. Chris writhes beneath him but it’s too late. His hand closes around the base of the penis that he touches with all due tenderness, tracing the cold steel ring there, the delicate flesh of this Internet angel, but in his mind Jack has already gone away. He has already had sex with Chris and driven home, to wait in the rented house for his brothers and their families. He is already coming down to breakfast the next day, their new bottle of scotch still on the kitchen table, having slept badly on one of the single beds. He is eager to make coffee and all smiles. His own loneliness still rock hard, untouched by anything, even him.