“Everyone’s out,” Eddie said dryly. “Except the men who are married to women who think they’re straight.”
“Polly knows you’re gay?”
“Polly Hotalling wouldn’t dream of having a chair recovered without showing me the fabric samples first.”
No matter what, he made me laugh. “Are you good at that?”
“I am neither good nor interested, but certain stereotypes prevail.”
All the parts of the story swam out of order: the pieces that were mine, the pieces that were Eddie’s, the parts that belonged solely to my mother. “I’m trying to get my head around all of this.”
“Okay. I shouldn’t have started with the Turkish restaurant.That’s not where this starts. This starts at the beginning of my sophomore year at Yale when I walked into my dorm room and found Skip Hotalling lying on the better of the two beds.” Eddie shook his head. “When he looked up at me, it was god and man. His grandmother was a Creek Indian, did I tell you that?”
“Don’tcha wanna dance with me, baby?” the catsuited woman sang.“Don’tcha wanna dance with me, boy?”
I shook my head. I listened. I didn’t say, You have told me nothing.
“That business about him wanting to devote himself to the cause of the Native American people was real, at least until he started law school. He had this country in his blood. A more beautiful man there never was. I can look out over this trophy case of human life and promise you not one of them could hold a match to Skip Hotalling at nineteen. And on top of that he was tender and funny and dear. Very dear to me.”
I tried to reconcile the boy in the story with the taciturn man seated next to me at the Century Club on the evening of his fiftieth wedding anniversary. I suppose we all change. “So the two of you—?”
“That’s a long story, the two of us. Back then we didn’t know what it all meant. We didn’t know if the other was interested or how our own interest might manifest. It was very difficult to study.”
“I’m assuming you figured it out.”
“I did,” he said. “We did. But it took some time. Twenty-three days to be exact. Twenty-three days of potential bliss we wasted waiting for the other one to make the move.”
“Who made the move?”
Eddie tipped his head down so as to look at me over the topof his glasses.
“You made the move,” I said.
“Later it would become our favorite topic of conversation. Skip said he had no experience in these matters. Dreams, hopes, desires, of course, but no experience. So I said no experience here either.” He pressed his hand to his starched tuxedo shirt. “Pure as snow.”
“Let the record state that Mr. Triplett had no past at all.”
“He believed me,” Eddie said. “And I believed him. It was all very sweet.”
“So then what?”
“Then we decided that college would be the happiest time in our life, which it was. After college we’d both get married and have children and lead regular lives, all the while maintaining a second life that would be the two of us—Skip and Ed. That’s not so complicated, right?”
“So Skip marries Polly.”
Eddie nodded vigorously. “Skip marries Polly. As you know, he met her at that god-awful dance the week before graduation. We had one more week together, then it was home for the summer and Skip was going to start law school at Columbia and I was going to Boston to be a slush-pile reader at Houghton Mifflin because I hadn’t found a job at a New York house. Skip was still irritated that I hadn’t taken the LSAT. He thought we both should go to law school, put the future off for a few more years, but I had no interest in the law. We had one more week together in the dorm, one more week of real life before the whole thing fell apart. Skip wanted to stick to the plan: we would both get married and then it’s fine to go off together as much as we wanted because that’s what guys do, he said. Skip says, ‘All we’vegot to do is find the right girls,’ and I said, ‘You can’t justfinda girl. It’s not like you’re looking for a car.’ And he said, ‘The hell it’s not,’ and he turned around and went straight back to the dance, where he found Polly Wellons by the punch bowl waiting for her roommate to come back from the bathroom.”
“Now you’re making me feel sorry for Polly.”
For a moment we sat there, taking in the beauty of young people dancing, everyone having had too much to drink. The catsuit had moved on to “Proud Mary.” There were backup singers now, and men with horns. The volume continued to dial up and soon we’d have to excuse ourselves or be saddled with a lifetime of deafness.
“It’s hard for me to feel sorry for Polly,” Eddie said absently. “I believe she’s gotten everything she ever wanted, and she’s had fifty years with him.”
I imagine that Polly did not get everything she ever wanted. “So he went to Columbia and you went to Houghton.” I didn’t want to raise my voice, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to hear.
“And I never lost one minute of sleepin’ worryin’ ’bout the way things might have been.”
“No,” Eddie said brightly. “There was a last-minute reprieve. Harvard took Skip off the wait list. He lost his deposit at Columbia, and we got a convincing two-bedroom apartment in Cambridge. Polly was a sophomore at Pine Manor in Chestnut Hill. Skip only let her visit once a week. He said he needed to study. I am certain I saw more of young Polly Wellons in those years than he did. She was always trying to fix me up with herfriends, until she decided that none of them were good enough for me. After graduation, Skip landed his big job in New York and bought an engagement ring. Polly and her mother took a year to plan the wedding.”
