The Son of Every Man

Chapter 7.1

I've just been called a pervert for wanting to know about their first intimate moments together. My accuser is Miguel, of course, who casually brings the term into play amid a sudden bout of laughter. Caught off guard, I stutter defensively, but he assures me he is only messing around.

"Tell you what, I'd be pissed if you left that stuff out. That's called censorship. What did the kid say about it?"

Every single week, through one avenue or another, he arrives at this question. I remind him how he's always the first in line for questioning—that I will ask Gabe later, at home.

"Fine, fine," he says, shooing me away with his hand. "Just tell me what he says, next week."

I promise him I will.

Early in the evening, As Gabe joins me in the front room, I decide to lead with the same question that had prompted Miguel's outburst. He takes his seat across from me, next to the decommissioned player piano. He smooths the front of his chambray button-down with intent, as if the studio microphone directed at him were instead a television camera. Sunlight spills into the room through the west-facing bay window. A hot white shaft of it drapes neatly over his left shoulder.

I study his eyes, nut-brown and wandering, until they finally resolve to mine. And they stay put. Eye-contact is a funny thing with Gabe. Sometimes, even for entire conversations, it's impossible to capture. But then, in moments like these, I get a little rush as I become the sudden target of his laser-guided focus.

Cool air whooshes from a vent nestled in the carpet. I take a quick breath and ask, "Will it make you uncomfortable if I include the sex?"

As is so often the case, Gabe presents me with a more nuanced point of view: "I just don't see how you could avoid it. In those early days, the physical component was inseparable from the emotional. If you really want to tell a story, don't leave it out. I understand the temptation. You're trying to solve a problem. But you'll just end up causing more."

Nodding along, I jot down: "early days - physical inseparable from emotional."

"Anyway," he says, "you're not actually going to leave it out, are you? No matter what we say. You're just hunting for a reaction, right?"

I look up. Those quivering irises haven't left me yet. "Yes, that's right."

;-;

When Gabe woke up, Miguel and Eddie had been talking about dreams. He remembered that. Eddie's description had unraveled, vivid and forthright, so unlike anything the man had ever described before. Was it because he thought Gabe was sleeping? Maybe he shared a more vulnerable rapport with Miguel when Gabe was not around. Whatever the case, Eddie's words arrived so unexpected that there was a twilight moment in which Gabe wondered whether he himself might be still be lost in reverie.

He had been feeling that way a lot lately, suspended in a not-quite-waking state ever since his mother died. At times he fantasized that he might, at literally any moment, wake up and find her still alive, in vastly better condition than what he remembered of her toward the end. "I thought you were sick," he would say. She would be on her way out the door to teach creative writing at UCLS, where she was adored by her students. She would pause, look at him strangely and say, "I've never felt better." But this fantasy did not stop with his mother—Gabe himself would be different somehow, would be better, could already claim a modest list of his own accomplishments, whatever they might be. It was a version of himself who never quite came into focus in his mind, but whom he envied just the same.

...Or maybe, he would wake to find he was someone completely different...someone who, with any luck at all, starred in a gorgeous life, unknown to him now, but instantly, entirely familiar upon waking. Maybe he was a woman. He had no particular desire to be one, and yet, would it seem so out of place if it turned out he had been one all along? Maybe this woman was tall; perhaps she was cared for by a handsome man who was even taller and she wrote about literature. She would sit up in bed, clutch her expensive Japanese linens, look over at her sleeping husband and think, "Huh," as the nearly nineteen-year-long gray sea of Gabe's life compressed down to twenty minutes' worth of unusually inventive sleep.