Page 11 of Hush
“I’d say anytime, but…” Tom tried to smile. “Your next guy better treat you right.” He hissed after he spoke, drawing a breath reflexively, as if he’d been stabbed and was sucking against the pain. Hopefully Mike wouldn’t notice.
He didn’t seem to. “I don’t think there will be a next guy for a while.” Mike straightened, gripped his briefcase, and took a step back. “I’ve got some stuff to take care of in my office. If you need anything, Your Honor, I’ll be down the hall.”
“I’m good. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“On time. I promise.” Mike headed for the door and disappeared out into the hallway.
As the door shut behind him, Tom slumped sideways against his desk, resting his hip on the dark cherry wood as he curled forward and let out a whoosh of air, breath he’d held since Mike’s last smile.
He closed his eyes, and wished, for a moment, that he could erase Mike from his own memories.
Chapter 3
Tom set down his glass of wine on his kitchen counter, obsessively twisting the stem until it was in the perfect meridian on his slate-gray granite, exactly between the two edges of his expansive kitchen island. He was surrounded by French provincial décor, cream and ivory cabinets and deep gray granite, and fragile blown glass bucket lights that hovered over his island. They were the only lights on in his house, three little pools of light that barely stretched to the counter’s edge. His wine glass sat on the outside of the circles of light, untouched. Unexposed. Unilluminated. He’d come home and grabbed a glass of wine and sat, and hadn’t moved.
In the living room, a clock ticked, the softtocksas loud as a shotgun blasting through his silent home.
His silent, empty home.
Perfect, in a catalog decorator’s way. He’d poured his time and money into his house over the years, giving his weekends and his evenings into fashioning the perfect home for himself.
And, for Etta Mae. Etta Mae, his six-year-old Basset Hound, snored softly on his sofa, spread-eagled and flat on her back. It was her post-dinner nap time.
But other than Etta Mae and him, his home was as warm as a haunted house. And as lived in as a Hollywood set, a cardboard cutout of a surface-level life. His life was practically scripted in its routine and repetition, but who would want to see something so boring? Laundry for one, done every Sunday, socks and undershirts and boxer-briefs that he collected in a little plastic basket in his closet and that Etta Mae liked to ransack. His dry cleaning, picked up every Wednesday like clockwork. Cooking for one every night, except Tuesdays, when he ate out before teaching his adjunct law class at Georgetown.
A single chicken breast. A lonely salad. A glass of wine, occasionally a second. Tonight, he’d had at least three. But a bottle could last him a week, sometimes.
He was utterly, completely, alone.
He rolled his wine stem again, watching the burgundy cabernet shiver in his glass. He’d chosen this. He’d chosen to be alone. It had been his plan.
Ever since 1991.
1991. The Moral Majority had successfully united the Christian far right with the Republican party the decade before, and their firebrand religious purity defined the national attitude toward gays. Freddie Mercury died that year. He died of AIDS, of “Gay-Related Immune Disease”, of “gay cancer”, according to the press, and society, and every terrible headline that screamed the news. The Reverend Jerry Falwell called it a “gay plague” sent to cleanse the world. The World Health Organization had only stopped listing homosexuality as a disease the year before. In Washington DC, Congress had disallowed the District from repealing the sodomy law. The U.S. Congress had forced DC to keep the sodomy laws on the books, criminalizing homosexuality.
Criminalizinghim.
ACT-UP protested across the nation. AIDS ravaged the community. Fear clung like cloying perfume, choking everyone, an oppressive humidity made from millions and millions of fallen tears, the cries and wails of gay men dying all alone, dying in fear, dying in rage. Dying for no reason at all.
There were only two gay members of Congress then. The Democrats had only added support for gay rights to their platform in 1980. Terry Sweeney defined gay men on Saturday Night Live, and was widely regarded as a national laughingstock. Gay men and women on TV were relegated to the tragic roles—dying of AIDS, dying of violence, dying of drugs, dying because that’s what gay people did; they justdied—or to the comedic roles, where they were slapstick sidekicks, or inconsequential buffoons, never to be taken seriously. A whole swath of people, written off as a momentary tragedy or as inconsequential frippery.
Was it any wonder that society followed?
1991. He was a brash and brazen twenty-one-year-old, with one semester left before he graduated college. His grades were rock solid, and there were four years of stellar pre-law under his belt. He had acceptance letters for all his top choice law schools: NYU, Cornell, Columbia, Harvard.
His last semester, and he had time to burn. He was young, dumb, and full of come. He was invulnerable and fearful at the same time, rebellious and cautious, needing to live, to love, and to be loved.
He wanted the world to be the color of his dreams, wanted to paint in primary colors. He wanted to stride away from fear, and build the world that rang out in the protest marches, in the calls to action. He wanted the future, and wanted it in his hands.
He went looking for life in all the wrong places.
Long nights dancing, partying. Running from the cops when their bars were raided. Meeting Peter, and falling head over heels for him. Wild days and nights and days again of seemingly never-ending sex, smoking cigarettes out of the window over Peter’s bed, refusing to detangle long enough to pull on shorts and head outside. Alcohol-fueled adventures, and living life so fast, so raw that he felt like his nerves were exposed to the sky.
And, one day, his professor’s voice, still as blaring, still as distinct, still as stunning as a crash of cymbals in the center of his chest, even twenty-five years later: “I didn’t know you’d chosen the homosexual lifestyle. This will seriously hurt your career. Are you hoping to work for the gays and their organizations as some sort of legal counsel? There’s no money in the work, but… you won’t work anywhere else.”
He didn’t know what to say.
His entire life, his entire plan for his whole existence, struck down in a handful of sentences.
