Three for Christmas

Chapter 1“Veselé Vánoce.” That was the first thing I heard from Matthew Varga that made me pay attention. I’d seen him before in my graduate school classes and around campus for the past two years, but he hadn’t left an impression. He had just started his Master’s program in English Literature, studying something to do with video games and horror fiction, while I was inching closer and closer to the writing stage of my own degree. When we’d met at the orientation session everyone attended, whether it was your first or fifth year in the department, and he was one of many bright-eyed new scholars I’d seen that day. He was cute, sure. About the same height as me, with the same slight frame, and the same mannerisms that I knew marked me as gay also came up as he spoke animatedly about his favorite authors. The only difference in our looks was that he was blond-haired and blue-eyed while I had dark hair and eyes. We were not quite light and shadow, though. That hadn’t been what made me turn away from him, even as he offered to buy me a coffee and talk more about H.P. Lovecraft’s influence on Stephen King. I’d declined simply because this was graduate school, where I worked, and where I just wanted to keep my head down and complete my degree. I also had Tate, my boyfriend of seven years. We were more than boyfriends, though. I never liked using the word since it felt too juvenile. Even if I was still a student at thirty, that didn’t mean I was dawdling here; I was still struggling under the weight of student poverty and debts so I could eventually become a doctor. One of philosophy, sure, but being a professor had been my goal for years. Tate, on the other hand, already had a good job with a construction company and was several years older than me. He was not my boyfriend, but partner. The word was easier to say, and in the setting of a liberal university, no one raised an eyebrow when I said ‘partner’ over any other moniker. It was truly the place where—after years of stifling antagonism at my own home—I could be myself. And in school, I was myself. It just so happened that the true, authentic person underneath years of homophobia was still relatively shy and quiet. So even if Matthew seemed to be a nice guy, gay like me, and interested in the same books as I was, I wasn’t interested in hanging out with him for much longer than our classes, orientation sessions, or anytime we ran into one another in the English Department mailroom. Until this December. Until I heard him say those words aloud, so casually as if he’d always had them in the back of his mind but never bothered to say them until now. Which in a way made sense, since “Veselé Vánoce” was the Czech version of Merry Christmas. Czech was a language I’d grown up hearing, especially around the holidays, and a language that I had associated with nothing but pain until this very moment. “What did you say?” I asked him. I was at my own mailbox, combing through the notifications about building closure for the holidays and free textbook samples. “Oh, sorry.” Matthew smiled. A dimple in his cheek seemed deep enough to fall into. “I didn’t realize I’d said it aloud.” “Veselé Vánoce to you, too,” I said back to him with immaculate pronunciation. “Well, I’ll be damned. You speak, too?” I gave a fifty-fifty expression with my hand. “Mostly only Christmas carols and holidays.” “Ah, same. Well.” Matthew put a hand on his hip as he regarded me. His movements were delicate, only slightly effeminate. Though his body was slight, I could see the ripples of muscle under his shirt. I remembered the shorts he’d worn to the orientation meetings during the heat of the late summer, and how his legs had been chorded with similar muscle. How could someone who, like me, read books for a living and graded first year papers, look this muscular? And how the hell did he know that language? After an initial pause, we both seemed to speak at once, and in two languages at the same time. It wasn’t as if this bilingual identity was a rarity in Canada. We were a cultural mosaic, after all, or at least as the government advertised on its website. But the national second language was French. Everything seemed to be dominated by two labels in French and English, so much so that most people in the Ontario school system where I was from resented the classes they were forced to attend in elementary school. No one learned French beyond what they had to do, and then they’d dropped it for their own native preference. Even when stumbling upon other people with bilingual identities, it wasn’t as if Czech was a common next choice. It was far more likely to hear Farsi or Hindi in the hallways at school; Spanish or even German among the locals; and maybe some other dialects that I didn’t know when I went into Toronto. I knew that there was a local population of Eastern European immigrants nestled in the Cabbagetown district of Toronto, too, and if I really wanted to hear the language I had grown up hearing, I could find it. But I didn’t like my family. I didn’t want to exactly go browsing in the little district where I might meet a man who spoke like my father, or a woman who gossiped like my mother, and who probably hated gays, too. So, when Tate and I went into the bigger city, we stuck to the gay village and their clubs. We went through the music on Queen’s street, and then we went back home again and spoke nothing but English. When Matthew spoke, however, I was surprised to find now that it wasn’t the Czech language I hated; it was how it had been used in my family home, against me, and how no one from that home had ever once bothered to call me in ten years. I started to remember parts of my bilingual tongue the more he charged my memory. An entire lexicon came back to me as we gestured around the mailroom and pointed to objects. We reveled a secret history in nouns to one another, a secret family life that neither one of us seemed to enjoy. “I thought you were from the US,” I said. “How do you know Czech, then?” “How does anyone else know a language? You pick them up because they’re all that’s around.” He shrugged. “They hate you for being gay, too?” Matthew smiled, but it was weak. There was no dimple. “Something like that.” “Mine were drunks. They never said, get out, you know, but it was obvious. No matter what language it was spoken in.” “Right. Mine were religious. Deeply so in the middle of Nebraska.” He shuddered. I realized for the first time I was hearing about him, his life, and not what he was studying. I realized I had been doing the same thing, too. I only ever spoke about research, work, unless I was with Tate. And that, too, was like another language. Now that I had broken down a barrier as thick and divisive as the Berlin wall with Matthew, I started to tell him more about my actual life. He told me more about his. About his shitty roommate who never washed his dishes, brought women back over to the apartment at all hours of the night, and listened to music too loud. “I’ve been sleeping in my office on campus,” he said dejectedly. “It helped with grading papers.” “That sucks.” I was suddenly out of things to say. Hours had passed and I knew, that even without a window in the barren mailroom, it would be dark outside. I looked at my phone and noticed a few messages from Tate, wondering where I was. I had to go. “Hey,” Matthew said suddenly, his mirth returning. He held up a red and green flyer that he took from his mailbox as if it was the first time he’d ever seen it. “You heading to that Christmas Party tonight?” I had already thrown out the notice. I hated those parties. The social director of the PhD Program always tried to make those sessions interesting, a place where we could all unwind and talk to one another, but it always ended up being a place where you talked shop for hours on end or you watched as the sad grad students guzzled down free alcohol, said nothing, and slinked home on the bus. Tate and I had gone to one years ago now. We hated it. But Matthew had not been there, I reasoned. And I suddenly wanted the two of them to meet. “Yes,” I said. “But I gotta see my partner first. We’re probably grabbing dinner before we go, you know, since most of the food at those events suck.” “It does,” Matthew said with a shrug. “But it’s free. I’ll see you later tonight. And your partner.” “Tate,” I said. His name on my lips always made me smile. Matthew mirrored the expression as he repeated his name. “Tate. Nice. How long have you been together?” “Seven years, it’s like we’re married,” I answered honestly, yet I realized I was also answering another question in subtext. Matthew had angled his body closer to mine. He ran a hand through his hair casually. Both of our postures had relaxed as we’d chattered on in Czech, and then we’d drawn closer as we chatted about real life. Matthew was asking me about Tate because it was part of that new life we were discovering in one another, but he was also curious how serious this was. Very serious was the obvious answer. Tate really was like my husband. But Tate and I were also open-minded, or at least, had been open-minded at the start of our relationship. We’d been monogamous for years but had also shared our bed early on. I imagined that bed now, already cramped with the two of us inside of it since Tate was a big man when I met him, and he’d only grown larger over the years. Then I saw a flash of a potential future: Matthew there as well, between us, connecting us together. “I think you’d like him. Tate, I mean,” I said suddenly. I unlocked my phone and ignored his messages so I could bring up a photo of him. It was from a trip we’d taken to Niagara-on-the-Lake, a town close to us known for its wine. Tate posed with a bottle of red we’d just tasted, giving a goofy thumbs up. “He’s a guy that likes to work with his hands, but his father was a book editor, so he’s used to me talking about Lovecraft or Poe or whatever author of the week it is.” “So he fits right in at the grad parties,” Matthew said. We both exchanged a look and laughed. “Tate fits in, sure, because Tate fits in wherever he goes,” I said. “It’s the others at those parties who don’t really do conversation all that well.” “Yes. But I, as always, endeavor to be different,” Matthew said. “So I will see you both tonight.” “Yes, you will.” I realized I still needed to run this change of plan by Tate. Maybe he’d be too tired or want to have a night in and catch up on his television shows. Or maybe I’d just want to f**k him. I bit my lip. Maybe this was too presumptuous. Happening too fast. “See you then,” Matthew added. Before he slipped out the mail room door, he said, “Veselé Vánoce,” once again. And I knew there was no going back.