Page 42 of Rock the Cradle of Love
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Taylor tosses and turns for what’s left of the night. He dozes off here and there, but it’s fitful. The sheets are too scratchy. The bed is too small. The room is too empty. He’s gotten used to Noah’s solid comforting presence in his bed. In his life. And he fucked it up.
God, he wants to go home. To hold Emma, see Noah, talk to him. Explain and beg forgiveness.
He can’t leave before the funeral though. Two days. But by then, it’ll be too late.
Don’t stay on my account,says a voice sounding suspiciously like Uncle Bud.
Even though he knows no one’s there, Taylor lifts his head and glances around the dimly lit room. The baseball posters on the wall. The bookshelf full of books, dinosaurs, and other pre-teen-boy oddments.
Funerals are for the living.
Taylor digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. Great. His sugar high is causing hallucinations. “The family will have a conniption,” he murmurs into the quiet.
Go get your man, Taylor. If you love him, fight for him. I wish I’d fought for Walter.
Several of the conversations he’d had with Uncle Bud come back to Taylor.
Shortly after Taylor had come out to his family at the age of fifteen, Uncle Bud had pulled him aside at a family barbecue or something.
“Listen to me, kid,” Bud said in his cigarette-roughened voice. “Never let people tell you who it’s acceptable to love, all right? Man or woman, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you love them with your whole heart, that the person you love knows your heart,” Uncle Bud poked at Taylor’s chest, “and that you’re willing to fight for them against all odds, no matter what.”
“Okay,” fifteen-year-old Taylor had said, not understanding the full implication of Bud’s words until a couple of years later.
Taylor had gone over to Bud and Bev’s house to keep Bud company while Bev was at an Avon conference in Nashville. They were watching some old crime drama that took place in Florida. In Miami.Miami Vice, yeah, that was it.
A character was revealed to be gay. The guy eventually committed suicide by cop. Bud had been upset. More than Taylor thought necessary for a stupid TV show. Until…
“That there,” Bud said, pointing at the TV, “that’s wrong, Taylor. It’s gonna be a tough world for you to like boys in, especially playing sports like you do, being as talented as you are. Don’t ever give up the fight though. Old guys like me need to know you kids are going to make the world a better place.”
At what must have been Taylor’s partially confused, partially dumbstruck expression, Bud continued. “I’m a homosexual, Taylor. You’re the only one in the family who knows.”
“But Aunt Bev…?”
“Being a pansy, a fairy, wasn’t acceptable, wasn’t safe. So I did what all men were expected to do back in the day. Get married and have a family. I love Bev and I love my kids, Taylor, don’t think that I don’t. But I miss Walter to this day.”
Taylor’s attention was rapt. “Who’s Walter?”
“Walter and I met in Vietnam. We were there at the beginning of that clusterfuck, not at the end, thank God. Anyway, he was an MP, I was a cook. We hit it off, had Italian mothers, a love of comic books and the St. Louis Cardinals in common. We spent a lot of off-duty time together and we became lovers. It was a golden time in my life, Taylor, despite being in the middle of a war.
“Eventually we were sent home. Walter first, then me. He wrote to me a couple of times before I came home, and when I got back, I tried to arrange a meeting somewhere for a weekend, but he confessed that he was married, had been since before his time in Vietnam, and that he and his wife were expecting their second child. I never talked to Walter again.”
“You must have been some kind of pissed,” Taylor said.
Bud gazed into the distance, his expression soft, his smile sad. “I was hurt for a time, but I finally realized something. I’m not condoning what Walter did—breaking his marriage vows—that wasn’t right. What we had in that faraway place, in that fucked up time in history, was real and good and right at a time when we needed it. There was no way either of us could have handled being a gay couple in the 50s or in the 60s. Homosexuality was considered unnatural, perverse. Still is mostly, you know that, right?”
Taylor nods, his stomach twisting, considers Bud’s words. What if there’s a boy he starts liking? “Don’t be gay” and “You’re such a faggot” fly around the locker room like sweat and dirty socks. If the fact that he liked boys as well as girls got out, he’d probably be in for a world of hurt.
“That being said,” said Bud, “Walter was the love of my life. And fifty-five years is a long time to be missing a part of your soul. Fight for love with everything you’ve got, Taylor. You don’t always get second chances.”
Taylor brushes away the tears that have leaked out of the corners of his eyes. He can’t believe he’s going to listen to a figment of his imagination, but, yeah, he is. Within five minutes, he’s booked a flight home and ordered a taxi. He showers and packs up his stuff. The scent of coffee lures him downstairs to find Suzan breaking eggs into a bowl and a pitcher of pancake batter sitting on the counter.
Dark purple slides into orangish-pink out the window.
“Hey,” he says, dropping his duffle.
She whirls around at the sound. “You’re leaving.”
