Orientation

Chapter 2-2

The beef wellington was cold. It sat in its All-Clad pan on the counter, exterior perfectly caramelized. But, like Robert’s spirits, the puff pastry he had labored over was now deflated. Next to it were bowls he had covered with cling wrap: a mesclun greens salad with pears, Maytag bleu cheese, and walnuts, roasted potatoes with rosemary and parsley, a sad-looking chocolate soufflé that had emerged from the oven puffy and bursting with the scent of Valrhona chocolate, now a gooey concave mess, not at all tempting.

Robert sat alone at the kitchen table, nursing his fifth gin and tonic and feeling more than a little woozy. The wooziness was not a good thing—his stomach churned and his temples throbbed. He had consumed none of the food he had prepared, making G&Ts his appetizer, main course, and dessert. The denial, the food preparation, and the sad Christmas carols playing throughout the house took him back to another Christmas Eve twenty-four years before. The loss, then, had been much worse, and he had been much less jaded, but this Christmas night had some of the same feel of things going permanently wrong. At least twenty-four years ago, his loss hadn’t been compounded by a sense of betrayal. But at that time, he had truly loved the man who had died on Christmas night.

And had never really felt the same about anyone since. Not even this Ethan, with his stunning beauty and quick, biting wit Robert pretended amused him. Maybe it wasn’t betrayal by Ethan that cut into his heart so deeply, but betrayal from himself. Robert looked down at his reddened hands, a burn on the back of one from the oven, and thought he was nothing more than a silly old fool. Forty-six years old and sitting here alone on Christmas night while his young lover, the one with the dollar signs in his eyes, was off getting f****d by someone half Robert’s age. He felt completely worthless and alone.

No wonder he had no appetite. Was he so foolish that he allowed himself to be taken advantage of this way? Shouldn’t Ethan at least be here, pretending to enjoy the holiday with him? Robert couldn’t kid himself: they both knew their relationship was nothing more than pretense. A show for an audience of one. A prop to shore up Robert’s sagging jawline he encountered in the mirror each morning when shaving.

He assumed he had never allowed himself to think this way before. And yet, in the back of his mind, he wondered if he was kidding himself and if some subconscious part of him had known the truth all along.

He got up, the chair scraping across the marble floor with an unpleasant screech, and walked out of the kitchen, flicking the light off as he left the room. Let the damn Wellington, with its expensive Kobe beef and forbidden pate de foie gras, spoil in the heat. Let the greens wilt. Let it all go to hell. It was a meal for a happy couple.

Robert laughed at his own melodrama, crossing the living room to the bar. Maybe one more Bombay Sapphire and tonic would knock him out, and he could spend the rest of the night in oblivion, stop seeing his young lover in a thousand different positions with some twenty-something stud with a permanent erection and the stamina to go all night.

After all, wasn’t that what was going on right now? Wasn’t s*x the reason for Ethan’s visit to his aunt’s house, which was only supposed to last for an hour, had now gone on into the late night, without even the courtesy of a phone call to Robert? Once upon a time, Ethan would have cared enough to call and make up a story about his ever-absent father showing up and, oh, maybe how he wanted to stay the night in Evanston, since he hardly ever saw the man. It hurt that Robert rated so low these days that he wasn’t even worth lying to. Not even on Christmas Day.

Robert should have been thinking about pulling out some bags and packing Ethan’s things, leaving them with the doorman downstairs with instructions that he not be allowed back up. That’s what a strong man would do. Yet Robert tortured himself endlessly with Technicolor visions of why the boy was so busy he couldn’t be bothered to call, visions accompanied by a bump and grind score.

With a trembling hand and no small amount of spilled gin and fizzing-over tonic, Robert managed to pour himself one more drink. “Hey,” he whispered to himself, “maybe I’ll even go a little crazy and pop a few dolls as added insurance.” He pictured the little amber bottle of Ambien in the medicine cabinet. Robert kicked off his shoes, flinging them across the wide expanse of the living room, barely wincing when one of them went high and wide and shattered a framed photo of himself and Ethan in Tuscany last summer. “f**k yeah,” he slurred.

Shakily, Robert mounted the spiral staircase, spilling his drink as he went, grimly determined to put one foot in front of the other. He had enough sobriety left to know that to fall down the oak and wrought iron staircase could do some serious damage to his person.

In the bedroom, he flung the comforter on the floor and threw himself on the bed, dropping the glass on the rug as he did so. He expected sleep to come, blessedly, in instants. But it didn’t. He tried lying on his side, then on his back, on his stomach, two pillows, then one…none of this offered any relief. He turned on the TV and suffered through a horrible episode of Will and Grace on Lifetime.

Robert knew what was really preventing him from sleeping, and it made him sick, made him hate himself. He was waiting for the phone to ring. He wanted Ethan to call and lie to him, tell him a tale of a flat tire or some other handy, and equally incredible, story. And the sleek cordless on the nightstand had never seemed larger, or more silent. Robert couldn’t stop himself from glancing over at it every few seconds, as if his stare could somehow prompt it to ring.

But it didn’t. It stubbornly would not.

And Robert would not sleep.

Wearily, and feeling a lot less drunk, he finally sat up in bed, still fully clothed. The night sky pressed in, an inky palpable presence against the sliding glass doors leading out to the balcony. Robert thought back to that sad Christmas twenty-four years ago and how he had stood on that balcony, thinking of throwing himself off of it. Would it really have been such a loss? Maybe he and Keith could have been together through all these years now, in some fabulous and care-free heaven, where angels danced to the music of Dizzy Gillespie.

His temples pounded, and his state of inebriation combined with the late night hour to give him inspiration. “A walk,” he said to himself. “I will just get out there and take a nice long walk along the lakefront. It will clear my head.”