“How the hell would that have helped? It would just have outed me faster.”
“You preferred to keep sleeping with me even though I was blackmailing you.”
“You’re not hard to sleep with,” he said dryly. “Far from it. And as we -- and now everyone -- know, I like to sleep with men. And I’m not that choosy.”
I ignored that last comment, although it stung. I pointed out, “And then when I demanded money, you handed that over too.”
“That’s my point,” Ross said. “I gave you what you wanted. Everything you wanted, you got.”
I said bitterly, “Right.”
“What the hell did you not get? You asked for a part in the new play, and I got that for you too. Jesus Christ. I did everything I could think of --”
“That’s right,” I said, and suddenly I was on my feet and furious. “You’re so goddamned afraid that you let me blackmail you into a part in the new play. Was there anything you wouldn’t have done to keep my mouth shut? To keep yourself --”
He was staring at me, mouth slightly parted -- not a look I’d ever seen on Ross’s face before. Ross Marlowe was the living personification of Man About Town. The suave sophisticate who knew what to do in every social situation. But I guess confronting your blackmailing ex-lover wasn’t covered in Debrett's Etiquette and Modern Manners.
“What the hell are you crying about?” he asked.
I wiped my face on my sleeve. “Oh go to hell,” I said. “If you don’t know by now, there’s no point me spelling it out.”
He was very still.
It took some effort, but I got myself under control while he stared at me with those midnight-blue eyes.
“Look,” I said finally. “You asked why. So here’s why. Part of why. All these plays you write about characters finding their true selves and owning up to who they really are, and making difficult choices and standing behind them -- two plays about gay men being true to themselves against the odds -- and all the time you’re hiding behind this…façade of Ross Marlowe the brilliant heterosexual playwright.” Tears and my injured vocal cords closed off my words.
He said slowly, “I see. This was for my own good?”
I nodded, not looking at him, mopping again at my runny nose, leaking eyes. “I don’t expect you to understand,” I got out.
“Lucky for both of us.” Watching me, he shuddered and pulled out a pristine hanky -- and who the hell carries hankies? Wasn’t that proof to the entire civilized world right then and there that Ross was gay? He tossed it my way. “Jesus, mop your face.”
I took it with muttered thanks.
“So basically,” he said, watching me scrub my face, “You had some idealistic image of me and I disappointed you, and this is your revenge?”
Horrifically the tears started again. It took effort to stop them. I managed. “You never disappointed me.”
“No.” His gaze was intent. “What then?”
I said -- and I tried to be matter of fact, “I don’t believe you would have been happy like that, Ross. I don’t believe you --”
“Christ, you’re young,” he said, but he sounded weary, not angry. He set down his glass, rose, and came over to me, taking me in his arms. “Okay, listen, Adam. You’re twenty-three. I’m forty. I think I’ve got the edge in experience here. I believe in the things I write about, but I don’t want to live my life as some kind of gay poster boy for the arts, all right? I like my privacy.”
His arms felt very good around me, strong and kind and familiar. He smelled good too: a mix of rain and pipe tobacco and some overpriced herbal aftershave you probably couldn’t buy in Vermont. I put my head on his shoulder. I was very tired. I hadn’t slept since I’d done the interview with the reporter from the New York Times Theater section.
Playing Desdemona to Ross’s Othello hadn’t helped much either.
“This isn’t privacy,” I said. “This is…a lie. You’re marrying someone you don’t love.”
I felt the steady, even pulse in his throat against my face. He was past his anger now; Ross was the most civilized man I knew -- and maybe that was part of the problem. He said levelly, “I like Anne. I do care about her, whether it meets your…naïve definition of love. It’s a good working partnership -- or it would have been before you blasted it to Kingdom Come with your exclusive to the papers.”
Well, Kingdom Come was where I reigned. I didn’t think he’d find that funny though -- I didn’t -- and instead I said, “Marriage should be about more than friendship and respect, Ross.”
“Respect and friendship -- companionship, shared interests -- that’s a good basis.”
I shook my head. “It’s not enough.”
“You’re the expert now?” His tone was dry. “What’s the longest steady relationship you’ve had?”
“We’ve been together one year, eight months and twenty-seven days,” I said.
He didn’t have an answer. After a moment he couldn’t even meet my eyes.
I added, “Depending on how you use the word ‘together.’” I pulled out of his arms.
After several minutes Ross said, quite gently, “Did you feel I used you? Is that why?”
I shook my head.
I could feel his gaze on my profile. “It was never my intent. From the moment I saw you I…wanted you,” he said honestly.
Yeah. No question. I still remembered looking up from reading for the part of George Deever in All My Sons and meeting those smiling, blue eyes. Ross, who was good friends with the show’s producer, had been sitting in on the auditions that day. Every time I’d glanced up from the script I’d seen him watching me from the almost empty sea of chairs.
I hadn’t got the role. Apparently I didn’t look like either a lawyer or a veteran. But as I’d left the audition, Ross had followed me out of the theater. He’d offered to buy me a drink. And, as consolation prizes went, I’d have taken a drink with Ross over eating for the next three months easy.
We had cocktails at the M Bar in the Mansfield Hotel. Mahogany bookshelves, and a domed skylight. It had been raining that night too, glittering down like a fake downpour on a stage set. We drank and talked and then he took me upstairs to a luxurious suite and fucked me in the clouds of down comforter and pillow-topped mattress. In the morning he fed me cappuccino and croissants and put me in a taxi. I never expected to see him again.
I figured he did that kind of thing all the time.
Two nights later he had called me, and after a painfully stilted and painfully brief conversation, he’d asked me out. We’d had dinner at 21, and he’d taken me back to the Mansfield. And in the morning Ross had let me fuck him.
After that I’d seen him a couple of days almost every week. Stolen hours. Borrowed time.
The best had been the week we’d spent here at his cabin in Vermont just on our own.
That had been four months ago -- in the summer. We’d swum in the lake and fished and sunned ourselves. We’d barbecued the rainbow trout we caught and drank too much and watched the stars blazing overhead as it got later and later. We’d talked and laughed and fucked and laughed some more. He’d let me read his new play. I told him I’d been offered a job in Los Angeles, and he told me not to go.