How They Met, and Other Stories
Page 17

After we slipped in, I looked around the room and felt strange. It wasn’t that it was beautiful—it was just a hotel ballroom, with round tableclothed tables and white balloons with our class year printed in orange and blue, our school colors. But seeing it made me feel…sentimental, I guess. I had been to proms before, but this was the one that was supposed to be mine. This was a memory I was supposed to be having.
As I looked around at my classmates all dressed up, Dutch was scouting out a place to screw. He didn’t want to start in the men’s room, because that would be too obvious a choice. I insisted that going under one of the tables was a bad idea, since people would be sitting down soon, and then we’d be trapped. We walked back into the reception area. People didn’t seem surprised to see us, or to see that we hadn’t dressed up. They weren’t disappointed in us, because their expectations had never been that high to begin with. It bothered me.
Then Dutch pulled me into the coatroom and made me feel a little better. You know what it’s like to look at someone and realize they’re hungry for you? The thing I loved the most about Dutch was that he never stopped grinning—even if his mouth was serious, his eyes were in on the joke. He enjoyed me, and that’s what kept us going and going and going. He found the most expensive coat in that coatroom, then took a turn into the back, threw the coat on the floor, and led me on top of it. Button-fly access, yeah. Condom, nice to meet you. I could hear everyone outside not hearing us. I could hear the empty hangers ping against one another as my shoulder hit into the racks again and again. Dutch would stop and smile, and I would smile back and keep quieter than usual. I’d feel his breaths catching, measure the distance between them to know he was close.
After we were done, he squeezed me tight for a moment and then said, “All right—back to the prom!” I made the foolish mistake I’d made at least a few dozen times already—I thought, for that one millisecond of hope, that this might be the moment, the occasion that he would say “I love you, Erik.” Even if he didn’t really mean it. We’d been screwing around for long enough that I knew it was a conscious decision on his part to never use those words with me. And because he held them back, I restrained myself, too. The two times I’d slipped and said them, he’d just smiled and said, “No, you don’t.”
Dutch was hungry again, this time for food. So we put our clothes all back in place and returned to the ballroom. We found our goth girls and their punk boys, and we ate off their plates, which they let us do because they thought that was punk, too. We were crashing, which was nothing new. But this time I actually felt like I was interrupting, too. When the DJ started spinning hip-hop and pop tunes, Dutch made fun of everyone who went to dance to them. I could tell that some of our friends had intended to dance, but now felt awkward about it. I kinda wanted to dance. The best I could do was lure Dutch away, so the goth girls could get down and the punk boys could shimmy to their punk hearts’ content. I put my hand on Dutch’s ass and whispered, “We’re not done yet.”
We walked into the men’s room just as half the football team was peeing out the beers they’d tailgated before heading over to the dance. I thought, We really shouldn’t be doing this. But Dutch’s boldness carried me on. He held my hand and opened the stall door as if it was the door to Cinderella’s carriage. When he closed it and locked it behind us, I could hear the jeers. One of the guys pounded on the door, and I jumped. Dutch looked ready to start fighting…but soon the jeers faded. The football players left. Other people came in, but they had no idea what we were up to—not unless they looked down and saw the two pairs of legs.
This time we didn’t go all the way. We just kissed and groped, and it was almost like the beginning. Only it didn’t feel like the beginning, because I knew the beginning had passed a long time ago. Dutch was murmuring how hot I was, how great I was, how cool this was. Usually I could lose myself in that for hours. Usually that was how I knew I was okay. That being me, that doing this, was okay. I loved that he said these things, and I loved that when I was with him I could believe they were true. Which is different from loving him. But in some ways more powerful.
There was a spot on his back that caused him to shiver whenever I touched it a certain way. I loved that, too. I loved knowing his body that well. But it only worked when we were lying down, relaxed, quiet. When we were pressing against each other in a bathroom stall, there wasn’t that kind of vulnerability, that kind of control. It was like we were now one thing, and everything outside the stall was another. As opposed to when we were truly alone together—then we were each one thing, and the charge came from combining the two.
After a while our mouths and hands took their usual course. When we emerged from the stall, this kid I’d been friends with in seventh grade—Hector—was at the sink, washing his hands. He looked in the mirror and saw us emerge. And then he shook his head, as if to say, What a waste. And I thought, You ass**le. I turned back to Dutch and gave him a long, hard kiss, right in that mirror. Us against the world.
Here’s the thing—even if it was just sex, even if he didn’t say “I love you,” even if I knew it wouldn’t last, you have to understand that I would have been alone without him. I would have been so alone.
I held his hand as we went back into the ballroom. I couldn’t get him as far as the dance floor, but we found friends to talk to, joke with, tease and be teased by. I could see a few teachers and administrators wanting to say something to us about our clothing choice, but as long as we held hands, it was like we were invincible. When the prom queen and prom king were announced, I half expected it to be us. I was a little disappointed when it wasn’t, because I would’ve liked nothing more than to have walked on stage with Dutch, to give him that royal kiss in front of the whole school, to prove that we’d been here, unafraid.
The DJ announced that there was only one more song until the prom song, and that couples should reunite and head for the dance floor. Dutch looked over at the DJ on the stage, then grinned and sparkled even wider. He held me by the hand and led me in the dance floor’s direction. Then, just as we were about to get there, he pulled me to the side, into the shadows. He pointed, and I saw what he’d seen—a small crawl space under the stage, beneath the music. “Come on,” he said, hunching down, heading inside. I followed.
It was a maze of dust and wires and reverb. There was barely enough room to sit upright, so Dutch lay down on the floor, staring up as if the bottom of the stage was full of stars. I crawled next to him, and he immediately rolled to his side and kissed me. His hand ran over my back, then down below my waistband.
The first sounds of “In Your Eyes” came through—the drum and the bell, the steady heartbeat. And then Peter Gabriel’s first words—Love, I get so lost sometimes. I heard them so deeply at that moment. Even though Dutch was pressing into me. Even though I was turned on and warm and with him…I thought to myself, I’m missing something. I stopped kissing Dutch back, and the minute I stopped kissing him back, he knew it and he stopped kissing me. But he didn’t pull away. He didn’t let go. Instead he pulled back enough to see me. To read me. And I stared back at him, daring him not to move. I thought it again—I’m missing something. A few feet away, couples were dancing to their prom song, holding each other tight. I was missing that. And at the same time, I was here, under the stage, being held in this different way. Looking into his eyes. Having him look into my eyes. Staying quiet. Just watching. Feeling our breath, his hand still on the small of my back, on the skin. I realized I would always be missing something. That no matter what I did, I would always be missing something else. And the only way to live, the only way to be happy, was to make sure the things I didn’t miss meant more to me than the things I missed. I had to think about what I wanted, outside the heat of wanting.
I had no idea whether Dutch noticed any of this, or what he was thinking. When the song was over, we made sure we’d been hanging in the moment before a kiss, not in the moment after one. Then we crawled back out from under the stage and walked back to our friends. I forgot to hold his hand.
Later that night when we were naked in my basement, naked afterward, he said it to me. And even though it was too late, I didn’t say, “No, you don’t.” Instead I kissed him once, quickly. Then we lay there, and I let time pass.
PRINCES
The minute I hit high school, the minute the train station was only a walk away, I escaped into the city and danced. I had been practicing since I was seven—practicing to be that kind of body, the kind that gets away. Right after school, two days a week. Then three. Then four. The Nutcracker in winter, the big recital right before summer. I outgrew my teacher and his storefront studio. Cut class to audition for a modern dance studio in Manhattan. Treated my acceptance like the keys to the city.
When you’re a boy dancer, your progression through the Nutcracker is like this: First you’re a mouse, then you’re a Spaniard, then you’re a prince. I could feel my body changing that way, from something cute and playful to something strange and foreign, then something approaching beauty. You start off wanting to be a snowflake, to be a character. But then you realize you can be the movement itself.
I loved watching the boys, and I loved being the boy who was watched. Not as a mouse, not as a Spaniard. But now, as a prince.
I doubt my parents knew what they were getting into when they let me go to that first dance class. I know some fathers justify it by saying it will help when the boy grows up to be a quarterback, when he has to dance past the linebackers. I know some mothers tell other mothers that it’s so much better than staying on the couch all day. My parents never really discussed the subject with me. They came to the Nutcrackers, they came to the big recitals, and they came to the conclusion that I was g*y. Not every boy dancer is g*y, or grows up to be g*y. But come on. A whole lot of us are.
My brother Jeremy came to most of the performances, too. When he was five and I was ten, he got all worried that our Jewish family was starting to celebrate Christmas, with all of the red, green, and white costuming going on. It was only when he realized he was celebrating me instead of celebrating Santa that he was all for it. Five years younger than me, always a kid in my eyes. Whether he knew I was g*y or not didn’t really matter to me. He wasn’t going to be a part of that part of my life.
That part resided in the city. Specific address: the Broadway studios of the Modern Dance Workshop, housed in a rent-by-the-hour space between Prince and Spring in SoHo, with a view of a publishing company across the street. I had to audition four times in order to get in—there were only twenty students, mostly city, some suburban. Six guys, fourteen girls. The instructors were either older dancers who’d been worn down into being choreographers or aspiring dancers looking for a day job to support their auditioning habits. There was Federica Rich, a middle-aged footnote of the footlights. There was quiet, unassuming Markus Constantine, who looked at us not so much as teenagers but as potential trajectories, mapping the mathematics of our every movement. His counterpoint was Elaine, who’d just graduated from the dance program at Michigan, and clearly belonged to the dance-as-therapy school. She was always examining her reflection in our wall of mirrors.
And Graham. At twenty-two, he was only five years older than me. He hadn’t gone to college; he’d danced his way across Europe instead. He was beautiful in the way that a breeze is beautiful—the kind of beauty you feel gratitude for. From the minute I saw him behind the table at my fourth audition, I knew I would be dancing for him. To make him watch, so I could return the watching.
I was not the only one. We’d all tell stories about Graham and treat them like facts, or glean small facts and turn them into stories. Carmela had heard that he’d been an underwear model in Belgium. Tracy said he once dated one of the male leads at Tharp, and that when he’d left, the lead had drunk himself into depression. Eve said this wasn’t true; the dancer had been from Cunningham, not Tharp.