I gave his hand a pat and momentarily our fingers intertwined. “It has been kind of fun in a mildly terrifying way,” I joked. “I hope it’s not over too soon. I’ve really grown attached to…” I feigned misting up with emotion, “… Lucy.”
Evan swatted at me with a laugh. “Asshole.”
Afterward, I retreated to my office to work but my eyes kept being drawn to the window and the tree beyond. The sweet aroma of baking succulence wafted up to me and my stomach growled despite the lunch I’d eaten. I cautioned myself not to gain weight during Evan’s stay. I managed to focus on my work and the day succeeded in becoming late.
“Knock, knock.” Evan peeked through the sliver opening of my office door. “Thought you might need a beer before dinner.”
“Sounds great. Come on in.”
He nudged the door wider, holding a couple of cans of Bud. His eyes probed every inch of the room like an FBI interrogator looking for the flaw in my alibi. I realized this was the first time he had breached my business sanctum. I dashed to the window and shut the blinds.
“So not fair,” Evan pouted. “You get to bask in the only sunlit room while I’m banished to the inner shadows like a bastard stepchild.”
I took his offering and returned to my swivel chair as he hit the light switch and scattered lamps lifted the pall. “You’re right. It isn’t fair, my ill-fated friend, but I don’t make the rules.”
“Actually, you do make the rules, my fiducial friend, and that’s okay.” He gave my framed diploma a close inspection. “The only wall-hanging in the entire condo and it’s your MBA. You are such a desolate soul.”
“You’re forgetting the ‘Bless This Mess’ sampler in the kitchen.”
“I wasn’t forgetting. I was ignoring. You got your MBA in finance at OU? How was that?”
“Umm, it suited me. I liked Norman and an MBA just seemed like the right thing to do. I’m naturally good with numbers and I started doing the New York Times crossword at fourteen, so there you go.”
“The Times crossword translates into finance, how?”
“Markets are just puzzles with jeopardy attached.”
“You make it sound interesting,” he said earnestly. Evan had the quality of being sincerely curious about people. Or at least about me. “Was that where you met your wife?”
Sometimes too curious. “Yeah. Junior year, actually.” I pivoted the conversation. “Did you go to college?”
“Kind of. For, like, two seconds I was an art student at The New School but we’re talking about you.”
“What? You went to The New School?” I was genuinely intrigued. “That’s impressive, dude. Very prestigious. And Greenwich Village is way more exotic than Norman, Okiehoma. When was this?”
“Right after I graduated from Catholic High School. I absolutely fled Tulsa. And New York was almost far enough away for my family to forgive me. They could tell people I was artistic rather than gay.”
“I didn’t realize you’re an artist but it makes sense. I got a peek of your place and it seemed like the walls were …” I sought a phrase that might please him, “… festooned with art. Festooned, is that the right word?”
“Yes!” he beamed. “Some of that’s mine, by the way. The charcoal sketches. A couple of the black and white photos, too.”
“I can’t wait to check them out when this is over. What happened? Didn’t you like it?”
“Are you kidding? It was the most exciting period of my life. I was literally sparking like a neuron within this living, beating leviathan. New York City. Manhattan. Greenwich Village. My mind was blown. The students were all so sophisticated and brilliant. And the faculty was world-class. But it was very intense. Brutally, brutally demanding. The good part was there were museums and galleries everywhere, dude. We could even hop on a train and be at The National Gallery in D.C. in minutes it seemed.”
“And you were a young gay man in a city that never sleeps.”
I could practically hear the brakes screech in his head. After a full stop, he said, “A city full of creeps is more like it.”
“Really?”
“It’s a sordid tale that I’d rather forget.”
Evan had gone from buoyant to bleak in the length of a sigh. “Is that why you were only there for two minutes?” I waited but, for once, Evan was not forthcoming. “What happened, man?”
He was disconsolate. I could have dropped the subject but the one thing I knew about Evan was that he craved absolution for the sin of merely being himself. Something lay hidden that he feared to expose, feared what it might expose. It was suppurating within him. I felt it needed to be lanced.
“What happened, Evan?”
“What always happens with me. I walked blithely into quicksand.”
He looked at me as if there was nothing more to say, as if I knew him well enough to instantly intuit the story in full. But I was lost. He read my bafflement and with a pained sigh he added, “I got involved with one of my professors.”
“Involved?”
“Sexually.”
********
What transpired over the remainder of the afternoon was a post-mortem dump of how Evan’s great aspiration crashed and burned. There were no tears or even weepy eyes, only a soliloquy of sad dismay. As much was said in long pauses as was in the weary run-on sentences. At one point, I had to crack the blinds to let some light shine against the murk.
Evan arrived in the city like a hatchling astonished by the world beyond its shell. He emerged into Greenwich Village, walking streets consecrated by revolutions in American art, music, and culture. He could have afforded a bohemian flat on historic Bleeker Street where Bob Dylan once lived but instead chose to live in a residence hall in order to be immersed within the student life of America’s most avant-garde university.
And it was there that Evan found what he wanted. In that teeming city, on those storied streets, amid that cacophonous press of indifferent humanity, he was emancipated from censure for being who he was. The rigors of The New School were staggering. The intellectual requirements were far greater than he had ever encountered, but Evan had always had a determined, precise mind. It was the strictures of his family, church, and school that had stupefied him. Intolerance had been his oppressor and now, not only was he liberated from constant condemnation, he was actually encouraged to realize his full true self.
It was during his first semester that Evan came to know Jonathon Fitzpatrick. Jonathon was a docent at the Guggenheim Museum and a guest lecturer in the art history department of The New School. In small groups, the students would tour the city’s many museums accompanied by one of the faculty. They would spend an entire day viewing and discussing the masterworks of every age and genre of art. It was exhilarating and at the center of the experience was their frequent guide, Jonathon.
He was a tall, elegant man of forty-three with premature graying of his brown hair and goatee. His eyes seemed lustrous with insight as he parsed the nuance of each painting, and he spoke with a vivacity and sophistication that was enthralling. Evan came to anticipate those field trips with a lusty exuberance. As Christmas break was approaching, Jonathon asked Evan if he was looking forward to time at home.