On my nineteenth birthday, I bought flowers for myself. Or I bought them for the apartment, a splash of yellow petals to chase away the icy shadows of the place. What had been a warm and sunny haven when I moved in in June proved to be chilly and dim as autumn approached. That was the first year my love affair with fall began to fray around the edges. I put the flowers in an old spaghetti sauce jar and placed them on the table I put in the foyer when I moved in.
I was alone in the apartment that morning and, after smoking some weed and taking a shower, I stood in the under-furnished living room, pitching my voice up into the high ceiling as I sang ballads I had learned from a cassette tape of Josephine Baker songs. I mostly sang the English ones, but there were a few in French I faked my way through because they felt so good.
When I went out later to buy the flowers and something to eat, the couple was on the steps in the hall, the same couple that always sat out there. They had complimented my singing a few times before and, despite being a shy performer, I had decided to forget they could hear it when the urge came upon me. It made it less enjoyable if I felt heard. Today they gave me their usual awkward smiles and made a comment about me sounding good that morning.
To be fair, they weren't awkward. They were kind. It was me that had always made it stilted, returning their compliments with a quick, brash thank you that seemed to suggest I found the whole thing distasteful. In truth, I just found it embarrassing. It never stopped them from being kind. If I could go back, I'd tell them thanks and I'd make sure it sounded like I heard them.
Someone I knew back then and cannot now remember told me their story, how she lived with her family in an apartment at the back of the building. Her boyfriend was black and she was white and her father would not let him come into the apartment, so she would sit on the steps in the hall with him for hours each day. Often, when I came out of the apartment, they weren't even talking, just sitting side by side on the same step, holding hands and looking at the floor. If they heard me singing, they'd tell me it sounded good. If I had not been singing, they'd give me a shy smile and I'd return it, a half note to their whole one.
They were each of them big and rounded, filling the steps, and I was glad they sat above me and I didn't have to pick my way between them. It was bad enough they were relegated to the stairs without them having to get up to let me pass. She had hair the color of dark honey that fell in her face when she studied the speckled linoleum treads. His eyes were small and dark, tilting at the corners when he smiled.
That evening my roommate, Gretchen, outdid herself. After coming home from her job at a sandwich shop where we both eventually would work, she whipped up a sheet cake from scratch and popped it in the oven before jumping in the shower. When she came out of the bathroom later, she smelled like her shampoo, like apples and sunshine, and the scent of it made me look back longingly on summer even as I stared out through the living room windows at the empty tree branches.
Gretchen had arranged for a few friends to come over to celebrate my birthday. Some of them were more her friends than mine, but I didn't know that many people, and I was just glad she was making the effort for me. Our friendship had already been through a lot and, eventually, it would not survive us, but at that point, our bond was perhaps at its strongest.
"You need to shower?" she asked from her bedroom doorway.
"I took one earlier."
"After I get dressed, let's schmap," she said.
"Sounds great."
For once I had some weed and could get us stoned; usually she was the one to pack the bowl. Schmapping was her word for getting stoned, something that started before I knew her and had to do with smoking pot from a carved out apple. Stoners often have their own convoluted humor that cannot be made sense of in the sober light of day. I had gone with it from the start and was as apt to call it schmap as weed by that time.
The favorite guest that night was Kim, Gretchen's best friend, whom I had met when I joined their Wiccan coven back in the spring. Kim was funny and smart, but her mood could turn on a dime. If we hadn't bonded coming off an LSD trip a few months before, I'm not sure how long it would have taken us to get close. By that birthday, she was one of my favorites.
Also there were two guys Gretchen knew from high school. One was tall and hairy and the other short and rosy cheeked. They were each computer guys who lived together and made more money than all of us combined and tripled. Apple cheeks drove a red sports car and hairy owned so much gaming equipment it filled a room in their apartment. They were nice enough, but they were pretty square and it was a given we'd never laugh at the same joke. Finding out I didn't know Monty Python quotes by heart and realizing they did had left a mutual polite chill between us from the jump.
After the cake was cut, we sat in the living room, blinds drawn, and smoked a fresh bowl. I packed for everyone, even the computer geeks, and was happy to do it, even though hairy did choke for five minutes straight and comment that it was dirt weed. I can only shake my head now at how much that pissed me off. Kim had given me a secretive little smile, as if we'd talk later about good manners. Not that she was conventional or even very well mannered herself. When Kim turned on you, it was like getting into it with a rabid alley cat.
Apple cheeks asked, "Steve not coming?"
And Gretchen said, "No, not tonight."
Steve was Gretchen's boyfriend. It was through Steve I had met her. I had known him first, a friend I met at the local tea room. Like me, he wrote poetry and was a bit of an awkward outcast. Unlike me, he was a novice expert on esoteric Icelandic poetry and was definitely not interested in sex with guys. That had complicated things a lot after I fell in love with him.
Everyone there probably knew why Steve hadn't come to my birthday party. Our friendship had chilled off after I had sent him a letter back in the spring telling him how I felt about him. He still lived at home back then. The redbuds would have been describing fuchsia zigzags along the road to his house. The mailman's Jeep would have knocked buds off the trees as he pulled close and dropped my note in the box. Back then Steve was just starting to fall in love with Gretchen, and he would have frowned at my envelope before setting it aside to finish a poem he was writing about her. If his mother was at work that day and he was free of her harassment, he'd have been chain smoking in his room and the smoke would have curled around his thin brass spectacles, reddening his eyes until the irises shown bright green. She smoked, too, but she didn't like it in the house.
Since then the wheel of the year had spun a half turn. I had left home and moved in with Gretchen. Steve had gotten a job at the library and found his own place that overlooked the old train depot. It was just a block away from our apartment over an English pub. The two of them had almost broken up twice, but had always gotten back together. I had more than once encouraged Gretchen to talk things out with him. I couldn't have him, but I thought she was good for him, and I wanted him to be happy. I was a brat in a lot of ways, but in caring about Steve I was pure. Not that I meant to be a martyr; I just could see that happiness was a struggle for him and I never wanted to make it any harder.
Steve wasn't not coming to my birthday party because he hated me. He just didn't know how to be around me anymore. I didn't know how to be around him either. I knew from Gretchen, who had told me to write that letter to him back in the spring, that he felt guilty for not loving me back.
"He said to me that even if he were gay, you wouldn't be his type," she told me one night. To say we had a strange friendship would be phoning in an answer. I had nodded with measured calm and said something about getting it, hating her so intensely for a minute that it was like a white hot pain behind my eyes.
But I didn't get it. It hurt a lot not to be loved back. In some ways, throwing myself into making my friendship with Gretchen stronger, despite our shared feelings for the same man, was an act of hope. Another person might have pulled away entirely from the whole messy little enclave, but I felt safe and loved when I was with Gretchen and Kim in a way that was not only a stark contrast to how Steve made me feel after the letter, but provided some counterweight that let me hold both things side by side in my life: the joy and the pain.
And through Gretchen, at least, I got glimpses of what life with Steve might be like. I knew when he was working on new poetry before he told me. I knew what was bothering him at work because Gretchen passed it on when we were schmapped. I even knew a little bit about his body, what he was like in bed, something I wished she hadn't told me. It was hardest of all not to hate her after she shared that part of their relationship.
Back in the spring, after I sent the letter, Steve didn't answer right away. Gretchen told me he was a bit freaked out. I wished I hadn't listened to her when she urged me to send it to him; I wished I had burned it, kept a vigil over the little flame until it left behind only flakes of white ash. That would have been a fitting transformation in the eyes of a novice young witch.
Gretchen insisted it would make things better. "Steve can tell something's changed between you guys."
"Did you tell him-"
"No," she said. "Of course not. This is your truth to tell."
Kim told me after our Midsummer ritual that I should stop obsessing about his reaction to the letter. One day I wouldn't even remember what it felt like to love him. She was thirty-five and divorced, still living with and fucking her ex-husband, even hosting our ceremony in his house. Despite her cosmopolitan outlook, I had trouble believing her. I even doubted that she understood my love for Steve. Maybe she was so complicated, torn between her desire for independence and her peculiar entanglement with her husband, that something like my feelings for Steve was beyond her comprehension. Her passions were all roses and briars, climbing in a knot to the moon, and mine were a yellow dandelion waiting to whiten and wisp and cast to the air, a swirl of wishes that would not come true that season.
In the end, she was right. Today I remember only the fact that I loved him and I remember bits of poems I wrote about it. I lost the paper copies a long time ago and I lost the feelings. I remember the dread that filled me in the weeks after I sent him the letter. That torment took a turn at the end of July, when he slipped an envelope into my hand one night before he and Gretchen ducked out of our apartment for a dinner date. It had been in his jacket pocket the whole time we chitchatted like strangers, the five minutes that felt like an eternity between me letting him in and Gretchen emerging from her bedroom, a beautiful heroine in a swirling skirt and lace edged blouse, dark curls on white shoulders. It was impossible not to see why she mesmerized him. Sometimes she had that effect on me, too.
After they left, I opened the envelope with shaking hands. It was still warm from his chest, which I had hugged close to mine back when he thought we were only friends, back before he always stood apart from me, waving hello and good-bye with a half smile. The cover of the card was printed with Waterhouse's Soul of the Rose. I wondered if he had picked it with me in mind or if he just had it. Maybe he saw something of the rose in me. At that point in my life I was sometimes frustrated by my gender. If Steve could see me for who I was inside and if my body was not a turn off to him, perhaps loving each other would make perfect sense. That was a tormented tangle I used to knot around my heart when I couldn't sleep.
Gretchen had told me a week before that night that Steve had drafted more than one letter to me, but that he'd destroyed them and never shared them with her. I wondered what he would write on the inside of the card, but was so afraid to read it, I just stared at the woman in the painting for a long while, taking deep breaths, allowing the silence of the empty apartment to impress itself upon me.
When I at last opened the card, my heart sank at the sight of the single line written upon it. In his fine, even hand, centered in a sea of white, he had written: Paul, better times to come. - S
Now I see how weeks of trying to honor my feelings through our shared love of words would have left him with so few. He could not have said anything truthful that would have made me happy. Still, at the time, I was confused, hurt, and angered by that single line. It struck me as inadequate because it was. It struck me as cold because it wasn't the far simpler sentence I craved: I love you, too.
Steve had never been prepared to answer a love letter from a boy he thought of as a friend. I had no role models to show me how to be a gay young man in the 90s, how to pivot, how to figure out where to look next. We were each ill equipped to meet the moment and the irony is that what he said was completely and inevitably true. Better times were to come. Better times than if everything had gone my way.
I think back on that birthday now and I am not so interested in my love story. I keep recalling the couple on the stairs, denied the boring and benign courtship of sitting on a sofa together in a room. They were denied a pleasant first family dinner, the looking at old photo albums with the parents, her blushing when her naked baby picture came up. He might have offered to help with the dishes.
I hope the better times Steve promised came for them. They were kinder than the people around them, generous with me again and again, despite my shyness, my inability to accept their praise. I wonder if they are still together, if they eventually found a place of their own and shook off the family that would not open their hearts to them. Maybe they had children and a dog. Or maybe they eventually drifted apart and she was left sitting on the stairs by herself one day, letting the silence of the apartment hallway impress itself upon her, wondering what the future held.
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