Page 14 of He
Jackson says that after Locust Hollow, University City feels like Graceland. This crowded city of strangers has granted us grace—grace to be ourselves, grace to love each other how we want, grace that the people we grew up with and around united to deny us.
Grace has changed for us in ways big and small, or maybe they are all small ways that seem big to us: when we’re on South Street, we can walk with our arms around each other; people don’t fall silent as we approach, then start to whisper once we have passed; we can call each other boyfriend; the threat of fire and brimstone no longer hangs over our embraces; old men ask to buy us drinks when we’re out. We always refuse. It seems untoward for men in their thirties to be buying drinks for a pair of eighteen-year-olds.
We went out to dinner to celebrate my birthday; we had a gay waiter. He was gay as a sun-dappled meadow, its wild grasses dancing wantonly, like a heathen naked, in the sunlight. “Y’all are so cute,” he cooed before seating us in a corner in the dark in the back—“A booth made for romance,” he announced.
Jackson ordered a tonic water and sipped it as if it was a very strong gin, as if the cocktail mixer itself was a first cousin to the devil’s brew. And that is I why I love him, my PK, my preacher’s kid. Once, lying with my head in his lap, I’d asked him how it was that he, a preacher’s kid had managed to love me, overruling his father’s will. He’d stroked my hair and said, “Easy. My love for you is stronger than Daddy’s hate for what my loving you makes me.”
Saturday, November 19, 1977, University City—Our new life is intruded upon weekly when Jackson receives a letter from his parents. These missives are full of prayers and denunciations and entreaties to leave me behind and return home, to return to the path God hacked out of the Garden. Though theCampisnever mentioned, it remains an implicit threat, a trap. Jackson has stopped writing back. He now leaves their letters unread in a pile on the kitchen table, and when he can’t seem to stand the sight of them anymore, he tosses the pile into the trash.
So yesterday, when a letter from his parents came—this one written in a female hand, I was surprised when he opened it. As often happens when he gets one of their letters, he grew distant. With sleep, he was restless. Eventually, he rolled into my arms and settled, as if he, lost in the desert, stumbling, had located me, his North Star high above his head, and followed me home to safety. By morning, his melancholy dissolved like a ripple on a pond.
I have not heard from my grandfather or my brothers once. But Jackson and I live through and for each other, so I do not feel their absence. I wonder sometimes if he misses his parents.
Saturday, December 24, 1977, University City—Jackson’s parents called today. Thinking they were calling to wish us a Merry Christmas, Jackson held the receiver between us. After Reverend Jack stomped and shouted through a “prayer for the season” without wishing Jackson Merry Christmas, he passed the phone to his wife. In her near whisper, her shadow’s voice, she asked about our apartment. When she learned there was only one bedroom, she asked if there was really room for two beds. “No,” Jackson said. “There’s only room for one bed.”
“So where doesthe other onesleep? In the living room?”
She always refers to me as “the other one.” As if I don’t have a name.
“He has a name,” Jackson said. “It’s Oren. And no, he doesn’t sleep in the living room. We have a full-size bed, so—”
She pounced with all the triumph of the holiday season. “See! If you’d come home, you’d have your own bed!”
We looked at each other. Having heard enough, I walked away.
“Merry Christmas, Ma,” Jackson said and hung up the phone.
After he had calmed down, I asked, “Why did you just hang up instead of explaining our relationship?”
“She wouldn’t understand,” Jackson said. “She and my father have always slept in separate beds in separate rooms.”
“They do? Why?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Something to do with Reverend Jack needing nights alone with his thoughts and God.”
Reverend Jack treated his wife not as a wife but like a disciple. I wondered for the first time if the bright, burning flame in Jackson and me that Reverend Jack had so determinedly prayed to extinguish also burned within him; I wondered if his outrage and moral condemnation of us was just the smoke from another fire.
I didn’t share these thoughts with Jackson because, despite his vigorous masculinity and intractable determination to be himself, he is pretty fragile. I was afraid that learning that someone like us, like him, had worked so hard to destroy us.That, I think, would break him.
Sunday, December 25, 1977, University City—Today was officially our first Christmas together. Jackson gave me a twelve-inch black-and-white TV so I can catchAll My Childrenbetween classes. I gave him a circa 1950s Avalon two-register mechanical chronograph watch to replace the Sears and Roebuck LED digital watch he usually wore. I’d seen it in the window of a pawnshop. It was more than I could afford, but the shop’s owner was an old gay guy who clearly fancied me. I’d exploited his lust to negotiate the price down. Wrapping the watch, he asked me with feigned casualness who the watch was for.
“My boyfriend,” I told him. He seemed crushed. I felt bad. When he handed me the bag and said sadly, but sweetly, “I wish you both a Merry Christmas,” I felt worse.
When Jackson unwrapped the watch, he blinked at it rapidly and looked from me to the watch and back again. “This is for me? Really?”
I nodded. “And it even works,” I teased.
“This is the best gift I’ve ever gotten,” he said. When he wrapped his arms around me, I leaned against him. My feelings about exploiting the old guy at the pawn shop evaporated. I would, I knew, do anything to secure Jackson’s happiness.
Green (1978)
Wednesday, January 18, 1978, University City—Mary Jane—henceforth to be known as MJ—is one of the first friends I made here in our new life. A thin athletic girl with short, bobbed hair, her wardrobe seems to consist entirely of worn coveralls, which she wears everywhere, paired with large diamond earrings and a Cartier tank watch. She is a walking contradiction. We’re both in the School of Communications so we have a lot of the same classes. The day we met last semester, she ran after me after one of our shared classes. “Hey, wait up,” she called. I stopped walking. When she caught up to me, she said, “I’ve noticed we have a lot of the same classes including the next one so I thought we could walk together.”
When I said nothing, she seemed to falter. “You’re Oren, right?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Mary Jane, but I prefer MJ. Only my parents call me Mary Jane.”
