"The Rehearsal."

July 2024

Collage by the author

Under the covers with sleep still in his eyes, Austin looked at me and said, “Maybe you shouldn’t have listened to ‘Brooklyn Nights.’” I was sitting on the edge of the bed and, even though I had my face turned away from him, Austin could tell how I was feeling. Awake for a couple hours by then, I was long finished with both my breakfast and the latest online effort to attract more readers to my 5,000 words on our conscious uncoupling to the tune of Lady Gaga singing, It’s not that I don’t want to love you/It’s not that I’m really over it, you know. Austin assured me it was just too early in the morning for him to get upset. Not that I faulted him his dry eyes, not when he understood precisely where my own tears were coming from. That afternoon, the ship would sail. There was a conflicting option, of course, a friend’s party that Austin initially seemed to prefer over this free sail around the New York Harbor. But he insisted he’d do whatever I wanted. And I wanted us on that sailboat. That’s the story I preferred. But there in bed, speaking for both of us, Austin said, “Would it be too sad?” Committed as ever to my daily constitutional, later that morning I was clocking in my usual eight miles around Fort Greene when I got an email from the South Street Seaport Museum. And through the sound of God’s laughter, I read, “We are sorry to inform you that due to unforeseen circumstances, your sail today has been canceled.”

So instead, Austin and I watched The Way We Were. “Would it be too sad,” indeed. The film was new to us but the season two finale of Sex and the City is not. It’s the one where Carrie is trying to accept Big and Natasha’s engagement, wondering if she can wish them well, let alone maintain any kind of friendship with Big. “Why her?” Carrie asks her friends to which Miranda says, “One word: Hubbell.” Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda all freak out, united in their love of The Way We Were. Samantha, meanwhile, has never seen it. And so Miranda explains that “Robert Redford is madly in love with Barbra Streisand…but he can’t be with her ‘cause she’s too complicated and she has wild, curly hair” to which Carrie pulls at her own locks and says, “Uh, hello? C-c-c-curly!” The episode, just like the film, ends outside The Plaza Hotel, where both sets of star-crossed lovers confront their sad sorry fate: it just can’t be. It’s rare that a movie makes Austin cry so it wasn’t strange to see him perfectly composed as Barbra began to hum over the rolling credits. I, however, cry at everything. But not that night. As, indeed, a Carrie, I can see myself so clearly in this story. Two people who love and respect each other but know in their hearts that they can’t be together? Duh. But maybe that was it. That my self-consciousness, my guilt, was what kept the tears at bay. At work the next morning, I told a coworker what me and my theoretically-soon-to-be-ex boyfriend watched last night. And with a disbelieving bark of laughter, they asked, “Are you insane?”

“Brian, I’ve been thinking about your dad,” said Daryl, the two of us alone together in the break room kitchen, right near the very end of our day. Usually, it’s music we talk about. He’ll assign “I Tried” by Angela Bofill or an album of Sarah Vaughn’s or Carmen McRae’s appearance on a 1962 episode of Jazz Casual and, next time we see each other, we’ll talk all about it. Conversations that so often lead to stories about my father, another man who loves music so very much. We have a lot in common, Daryl and I. Twice my age but nevertheless, we’re the only sons in a family of daughters, with mothers who rule the roost and fathers who seemingly never have much to say. When I first told Daryl about the breakup, he gave me all his attention. I can’t hold a note but the way he was listening to me—you’d think I was crooning. And it was well over a week later when Daryl said he’d been thinking about my dad, that he was still sitting on what I’d told him: that despite my father reaching out to me more frequently than ever these last couple weeks, he still hadn’t said a word about me and Austin. We have our go-to perches, Daryl and I. Almost always, he’s sitting in the same spot behind the kitchen table while I’m on this particular stool at the counter but, this afternoon, we were on our feet and right beside each other. And with our faces inches apart, his hand periodically reaching out for mine, Daryl said to me, “There is so much in his silence. It might not be in the language we prefer but that doesn’t make it any less meaningful. It took me a very long time to get that, Brian. And I don’t want it to take as long for you.”

Swapping my house shoes for sneakers, I walked downstairs with Austin to the front door of our building. We’ll still have some overlap in August, some time when we’ll be together in our apartment, if not our relationship. It’s not over, not completely, not yet. But in a way—this was it. He was headed to LaGuardia to catch a plane to North Carolina, where he’ll spend the next month with his family. And we’d come to the agreement that if anything happens with either of us, it would be all right. Permitting each other to live single. Though as I said to a colleague, “I don’t want to and…I don’t want to.” But that wasn’t on my mind, not at all, as a car pulled up to the curb and we took each other in our arms. “I love you,” I said to him, “And I love your family.” We cried and cried and cried. Austin was almost on the sidewalk when he stopped short and turned back to look at me. There will be no forgetting, not ever, that expression on his face. The car drove down the street and, with a parting wave through the window, he was gone. The night before, I fell asleep with my head on his chest. Me and Austin were always close sleepers but, in these last five years, I don’t think I’d ever done that before. It was a first.

Born on the Fourth of July, my nephew Vincent turned three years old. I was working. Making time-and-a-half, thanks to our latest union contract, but another day at the museum nevertheless. I’ll be spending more of this summer in New York than I ever have before. The last couple years, I was never in the city any longer than a month at a time. We’d go to North Carolina in June, come August I’d take care of Cam’s Shiba Inus in south Jersey, with two treks to New Hampshire in between. Now I’m single, and I worked on my nephew’s birthday, and Cam moved too far away to justify dog sitting. Ch-ch-ch-changes. But I didn’t have to be at work that Fourth of July, not really. I could have pleaded for coverage and accepted Jillian’s offer to come get me, joining her for the drive up to New Hampshire where our whole family could be together and celebrate Vincent’s birthday. But it would have meant being away from Austin during his last couple days in New York. And I wasn’t willing to do that. During each of my breaks, I called Lindsay, wanting to make up for my absence with the shallow wonders of Facetime. They were always in the middle of something. But once I was home from work and they were at a minor league baseball game, we finally got in touch. Lindsay handed the phone to her son and his brow immediately furrowed. I was sitting on the couch in our living room, shirtless and sweltering, the back half of our apartment roasting in the setting sun. Totally ignoring my sing-song happy birthday!, Vincent stared at me and said, “Why are you naked?”

And born on the fifth of July, Shannon turned 30. She was my big surprise last year. Home in New Hampshire to celebrate Thanksgiving—and, by association, my own 30th birthday—we’d just arrived at Lindsay's house when suddenly the basement door opened and there was Shannon. I hadn’t seen her in over two years. “Well, Shan,” I remember saying, “This is Austin. You know—my boyfriend of nearly five years?” They’d never met before. Watching them get to know each other, I felt like I’d coughed up my lungs or something, like some crucial inner part of me was out in the world and I got to see how it all works. And just as my parents did for her, Shannon’s mom offered to fly me out to Boise for her birthday. I could have been there. But once again, I wasn’t willing to do that. In my defense, there was a time when I really thought I’d be moving out at the beginning of July, when our definitive goodbye and my subsequent relocating was supposed to happen just a couple days before Shannon’s birthday. That was the initial schedule of this drawn out breakup. But those plans had changed—and with more than enough notice to accept that airfare and show up for my best friend. To do for her what she’d done for me. And I didn’t. I think I’ve disappointed a lot of people lately.

“I’d kill myself,” said Koko, over iced teas in Bushwick. Lacking my best friend that day, I met up with my oldest. Seventeen years ago, my family moved to New Hampshire and I’ve known her ever since. Though I really only got close with Koko, one year my junior, after I failed freshman algebra and had to re-take it as a sophomore. At last, I had access to this person I’d previously just admired from afar, finally getting to talk to this peroxided girl in houndstooth who brought such corrective color to our plain little town. Cool to the touch but inwardly combustible, Koko has been a New York City girl for over a decade now, with all the frankness that demands. “You never really had friends, did you,” she said to me once, years ago, the two of us coincidentally taking the same bus from Concord to Boston, where she’d continue on down to New York. A devastating remark from most anyone else but, from Koko, it only felt honest. Proof she’d been paying attention. I know we mean it, in our yearly birthday texts, when both of us say, “It’s comforting to know that you’re always here with me in New York.” Home in our home away from home. And yet we almost never see each other. Fellow Virgo risings and Aries moons, taskmasters equally beholden to our routines, I know better than to take it personally. Especially when it felt so easy to talk to her this afternoon at that cafe on Irving Avenue, seeing her for the first time in a while and telling her how these last couple months have been, on all the unavoidable torment and our still-comforting togetherness. Smirking at me from behind her sunglasses, Koko said, “Yeah…I’d definitely kill myself.”

Early to the East Village for drinks with Ashleigh and deciding to go look at the water, I made my way to the very end of 14th Street only for ConEd’s headquarters to foil that plan. But it wasn’t for nothing. Walking around, I’d been watching all the people that passed me by. Old Puerto Rican ladies, old Jewish ladies, old punk ladies, pushing shopping carts or adjusting the bath towels around their waists after a swim in the Dry Dock pool. Men and children, in their lawn chairs and their strollers, watching everything. Perfect New York faces, everywhere I looked. I could have kissed just about every stranger I saw. A couple weeks ago, I wrote in my diary, “Jarod can’t feel the presence of God in the city.” I can’t remember how we landed on this particular conversation—at work, no less—only that I was struck by it. If it’s only in the trees that Jarod can feel some grace, bless him for it. I just don’t agree. Because it isn’t just something I can feel here, it’s something I see. He walks down the street.

By design, I have a hot doctor. My selection of my PCP based solely on the merits of good looks rather than his one and only online review that described him as “cocky, arrogant, and skeezy.” And I clearly wasn’t the first gay guy to pull this stunt. Opening the exam room door and introducing himself for our first appointment, I could see the wolf inside of him. Sly and lascivious—but with a great head of hair. Taking a seat in front of the computer and asking for my medical history, I looked at his face in profile and noticed he was pursing his lips between every question. “Skeezy,” I’m not so sure, but he is definitely in love with himself. Why else become a doctor, I suppose. For a couple weeks, I’ve had a pain in my left ribs along with this strange difficulty catching my breath. The morning of the appointment, I called my mom to tell her about it. Once the baby, always the baby. Dealing with some digestive stuff, she too was trying to see a doctor. But she doesn’t have health insurance. On account of not working enough hours, she was taken off her plan—with zero notice from her employer. My mother will go this entire year uninsured. And she only realized this a couple months ago after getting a bill for some routine blood work. She owed hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Hanging up the phone, I pressed at the pain in my side. As much as ever, it hurts.

“I think worrying is the most human emotion, maybe even more than love,” said Sophie, as we took our seats for a clandestine production of The Seagull that we were expressly informed to call “an invited rehearsal” if questioned by any employees of this venue. Isaiah, our friend and coworker, had separately invited us to see him in this play and, without meaning to, Sophie and I both opted for closing night rather than opening. (There were two total performances.) I was so happy she was going. Leaving the museum together, we walked up Orchard Street and over to 2nd Avenue to buy Isaiah flowers. It was Sophie’s idea and, even though we split the cost, I made sure she was the one to present them. “Well, Sophie—what do you worry about?” I asked, as she laughed for backing herself into this corner. Not that she’s hesitant to share these things, not with the right person. She’s explained to me how people tend to revel, socially, either in breadth or in depth. Per this conceit, we’re both “deep.” But what’s perfect about Sophie is that she’d hear such a qualifier and, unabashedly, roll her eyes. More than anything else, she worries about her family. About her sister and her parents. I wondered if maybe that’s what attracts one person to another. More than our interests or attributes or anything else. Because as I said to Sophie, those are my very same worries.

Isaiah came to see me and Sophie before the show, telling us where to sit for the best view of him in all his scenes. Already in costume, I said to him,  “So very pre-Revolution!” And it was with immense relief that I read the Wikipedia page for The Seagull that night and confirmed it was, in fact, written before the Revolution. This production was directed by Isaiah’s boyfriend. Earlier that day, at the museum, Isaiah said to me, “You know, I’ve been thinking about that question you asked me last week—of what it’s like being directed by a significant other.” It was staged in the round with the actors visibly seated in the far corners and, as I watched his boyfriend introduce the play, I felt I was an audience to several things at once. It was really great. Even if Isaiah wasn’t the one playing old Uncle Sorin, I think I’d still feel the same way. Vibrant and alert with really considered performances from young actors who did it all for free. And even when the titular dead seagull wound up being a stuffed toy pigeon, it didn’t feel cheap—it felt jarring. Warranting a sincere double take. Necessity, the mother of dramaturgical invention. And, sitting directly across from us, the mother of the Ingenue. This woman had walked into the venue minutes before curtain with wine bottle in hand and, to everyone and no one, asked, “It said we could bring our own, didn’t it?” Already suspecting a family resemblance between her and the actress playing Nina, said suspicions were confirmed just as soon as this woman held out her phone and proceeded to take pictures during her daughter’s biggest scene. With her flashlight turning on in the process. Beside me, ever so softly, I heard Sophie groan. While we were congratulating Isaiah after the show, the mother joined us to do the same, making a couple remarks that had me laughing out loud. I realize I do that a lot, that I’ll cackle right in the face of people who aren’t necessarily trying to be funny. An apparent believer that all the world’s a stage, I guess, I do mean well by it. But I’m not so sure she took it that way.

Holding out his cigarette to spare me the second hand smoke, Jarod and I hugged goodbye out on Orchard Street. That next day, he was flying to Greece for the start of a two-week European vacation. In the years he’s lived in New York, he’s never taken this much time off from his jobs. “You work too hard” is something I tell him a lot. Though maybe that’s inappropriate. Not just anyone can make ends meet off 24 hours a week, I realize that. I myself could be approaching the end of that era. September’s coming soon. The week before he left, I met up with Jarod at a bar in Ridgewood. He’s a good listener and a great talker. There were tears in my eyes as I told him about this specific passage from Annie Ernaux’s Happening, a quote long ago committed to memory, where she goes into a church and tells the priest she’d had an abortion. “I immediately realized this was a mistake. I felt bathed in a halo of light and for him I was a criminal.” We talked about our mothers and he talked about his father. “Not a week goes by,” Jarod said, “When I don’t think of a new question I’ll never get to ask him.” Jarod doesn’t really cry, I know that much about him. But I wish he would. And if somehow I knew what it would take, of what I’d need to do, I’d stop at nothing to make him weep.

Four years ago, on July 15th, Mia was born. Lindsay recently had a coworker ask if Vincent is her only child. A painfully common question. In the past, she’d call him her only living child as gently as she knew how, only for the person on the other end to get uncomfortable and change the subject. “Just twisting the knife of grief in deeper,” wrote Lindsay, “Solidifying the isolating feeling of being a bereaved parent and piling on guilt that I’ve made others feel even an iota of my sadness. But today, I answered without hesitation, ‘No, he’s our second. Our daughter Mia passed away in 2020.’ I’ve learned the last few years that the world’s discomfort surrounding death, specifically pregnancy loss and infant death, is not my responsibility to bear. Mia is my child and as her mother, it is and will always be my job to honor her life, to say her name, and to let people know she is a part of our family. Mia was stillborn, but she was still born. My first born.” We have never been the same. And I try to understand that as a blessing.

“It’s a gay operetta set in a bathhouse…,” said Isaiah, asking if I’d like to join him to this show in the East Village with his spare comped ticket. Reading its online description, I said, “I can’t believe somebody beat me to ‘weaving together lessons from Dr. Maya Angelou, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Deepak Chopra, and Eckhart Tolle.’” Read: grew up watching The Oprah Winfrey Show. Unsure at first if anyone else was coming, if this evening would be a matter of breadth or depth, I was happy that it wound up being just us. On our way to the theater, we stopped for a bite to eat at that restaurant on 1st and 1st called One and One, sitting at a table on the sidewalk. I had a Narragansett while he had a Coke and when he suggested sharing the fish and chips Friday special, I said let’s do it. My long history of violently vomiting after eating deep-fried food no match against my desire to be agreeable. That and the faintest stirrings of nerves. With the sun in his face, Isaiah never took off his sunglasses and it took everything I had not to search for myself in their reflection. Talking about his first months in the city, and his occasional regrets about not taking fuller advantage of opportunities presented to him, I said, “Well—we’re all 18 when we first move to New York.” He got here at 22 while I was almost 25. Always the late bloomer.

With a fog machine creating the illusion of steam, not to mention an aroma that had us all feeling a certain kind of rush, a man walked out on stage wearing just a towel. Going through the motions of locker room behavior as more characters emerged, their teeth brushing and face washing a mere charade until the down-and-dirty could really begin. And so the towels started coming off. The actors weren’t naked, rather they wore bodysuits with these huge phallic rigs most closely resembling a rubberbanded t-shirt waiting for tie-dye. Either that or the Christmas pork loin. Bawdy and occasionally original, with an aptly climactic cum dump, it was downtown theater to the hilt and I’m happy I saw it, happy I made it to the end. Because for a moment there, I wasn’t sure I would. Watching this gay operetta play out before me, just a couple songs into the show, I started feeling something close to panic. Back at the restaurant, Isaiah asked me if I’m at all excited about dating again. I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no. Instead going off on this meandering yarn that likely had Isaiah thinking, “Jesus Christ.” But sitting there, a captive audience to this passion play, this fever dream, to these bodies reaching out and touching each other, something was clear despite the fog. I’m scared. Consulting the program later on, I looked for the song that had me verging on a nervous breakdown. It was called “Demon Twink.”

On my walk home from the train that night, I cried.

Austin and I have stayed in touch. He’s still the first person I hear from in the morning and the last person who hears from me before bed. Like always. But there was a day, weeks ago, when hours and hours went by without a word. That wasn’t totally unusual, a lull in our back and forth, not really. But these are unusual times. Talking to my mom on the phone that afternoon, asking how I was doing, I said, “I haven’t really heard from him much today and…I don’t know, I just wonder if he’s beginning to…to distance himself.” He wasn’t. I know now that wasn’t the case. But it will be. Whether I’ll realize it in the moment or not, there will be a day when we text our last “good morning” and “goodnight.” Sooner or later, there will be distance. I have no idea how I’ll feel once it actually happens. Until then, I think I’m still grateful for the rehearsal.

We’re gonna miss the boat, I thought to myself, as the seven of us blinked at the unexpectedly cordoned off J train platform at Delancey-Essex. With the Pioneer setting sail at 7:00, we needed to be at the South Street Seaport by 6:45—and it was almost 6:30. After briefly considering taking an uptown F to West 4th so we could doubleback downtown on the C to Fulton, Erica suggested we just get a car. Racing out of the station two steps at a time, I think it was Isaiah who said, “We’re gonna be like Barbra running to catch the ship…” And I really did fear it was about to rain on our parade. After me and Austin’s failed sail, Grace—who got me the comped tickets to begin with—asked if I’d already rescheduled for another day. And when I said no, she started plotting. Picking a date for a Saturday sunset sail and assembling a select group of people who not only enjoy each other’s company but whose company is enjoyed by specifically Sophie. For the first time since moving here, Sophie would spend her whole summer in New York. In previous years, for most of the season, she worked on Catalina Island. And when Grace first asked Sophie if she’d like to join us on the sailboat, she said no. That it would only serve as this solemn reminder of where she is and where she’s not. But catching Sophie one evening just before she left the museum, I said, “So, as you may know, I was supposed to take a very, very sad sail last month. And I’ve still got these two tickets with no one to join me anymore. So even if you make a totally last minute decision, it’s yours. We can be sad together on that sailboat.” It made me so happy when she changed her mind. Even if it was more for my sake than hers. And maybe that’s exactly why I was leaning in close to Erica’s phone, trying so hard to make sense of what the driver was telling us, taking charge in a way I almost always avoid. Hearing him say something about “Fabco Shoes,” I pointed us in that direction where, thank God, we all piled into the car—Erica, Grace, Cat, Sara, Isaiah, me, and Sophie. Eye on the target and wham. Boarding the 139-year-old schooner, and saying yes to the deckhands when they asked for volunteers to help lift the sails, away we went.

The night before, over drinks, Grace shared a story about fighting with an ex-girlfriend during a visit to Paris and how all Grace wanted to do was go back to the apartment but the ex insisted they go watch the Eiffel Tower. She doesn’t cry very much, hardly ever, but that night, looking at something that was supposed to be so moving and so joyous—Grace cried. The beautiful things will be the hardest, I’d imagine. But this night was easy. Getting settled around the companionway, the seven of us forming a perfect circle, we spent the next two hours paying almost all of our attention to each other. There we were out on that harbor, privy to these sweeping views of a city we all call home, a city whose history we’ve learned so much about. But besides some shots of Lady Liberty and a group picture when the setting sun was too gloriously diffused to ignore, as we sat in that circle, talking and laughing, eating the sheet cake that Sophie baked for us and fishing out spears of mango I’d shoved into a mason jar—I suppose we could have been doing it anywhere. But I didn’t want to be anywhere else. As Manhattan loomed larger before us, the ship docked and we touched dry land, reuniting with all its sounds and colors. Sophie and I ended up walking a little ahead of everyone else, not on purpose though maybe with a shared intent—both of us more interested in going home than heading to a bar. We talked about how much we love Erica, and how hard Sara made us laugh, and how we both could tell that Grace was trying desperately to keep her cool when seven o’clock was ticking closer and closer. Sophie had a nice time. She had fun. I did too. And when I asked her if it still felt sad despite all that, laughing, with a true smile on both our faces, Sophie said, “It was still sad.”