Uptown Girl Read Free Page B

one and make him an old boyfriend.’
    â€˜He’s thirty-four. Old enough?’
    Elliot rolled his eyes. ‘I worry about you.’ Kate looked directly at Elliot. ‘This one is different. He’s got his doctorate in anthropology and he’s very promising.’
    â€˜Promising what? You always think they’re different and you always think they’re promising, until they bore you and then …’
    â€˜Oh, stop,’ Kate interrupted. ‘I know: I won’t pick losers on account of my father and I won’t pick winners on account of my father. Yadda, yadda, yadda.’
    â€˜Don’t leave out your fear of commitment, yadda.’ ‘I’ll have you committed if you bring that up one more time. How come for thirty-one years you’re allowed to be a gay bachelor – in both respects of the phrase – and then one day you hook up with Brice. Bingo! But since then I’m neurotic for not doing the same.’
    â€˜Hey, I don’t want you to hook up with Brice,’ Elliot mock-protested. ‘We’re both strictly monogamous.’
    â€˜I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear that,’ Kate retorted. ‘But don’t project your fears onto me. It isn’t easy to find a kind-hearted, dependable, intelligent, sensual single man in Manhattan.’
    â€˜Tell me about it!’ Elliot exclaimed. ‘I had to try almost every guy on the island before I met Brice.’
    â€˜Try not to be bitter, Elliot. I try so hard not to be.’ She reached up and wiped off a remaining bit of banana from his mouth with her thumb, then gave him a little peck on the lips. ‘Do you really have to be gay?’ It wasn’t the first time she had asked him that. Ever since their college years – when the two of them became instant friends during a calculus class that bored him and that Kate had barely managed to pass – Kate had depended on Elliot to be her friend, sometimes her brother, more often her sister, and occasionally even her father. Elliot was family. Still, like family, he could be a pain in the ass. Then she smiled. Elliot was everything to her, except her lover. And sometimes she thought that’s what made her love him the most. Elliot was safe. Unlike the other men in her life, Elliot would always be there.
    â€˜What makes you think I’m gay?’ Elliot asked with wide-eyed innocence. ‘Is that your professional opinion, Doctor, or just a guess? Is it my spectator pumps?’
    In fact, Elliot was not a flamboyant homosexual. He didn’t look or act like what Kate’s old Brooklyn crowd might have called ‘a fag’ and, like most ofthe young gay men in New York, he didn’t go in for the high-maintenance GQ look. Elliot looked and acted like a grade school math teacher – no, what he looked like, she thought affectionately, was a classic nerd: the only thing missing was the broken glasses held together with a paper clip.
    â€˜How did a little queer kid from Indiana get to be so well adjusted?’ Kate asked him, also not for the first time.
    Elliot reached over, took one of Kate’s hands and held it in both of his. ‘Listen closely,’ he told her, ‘because I am going to tell you something from Indiana about getting in touch with your true feelings.’ He looked at her intently and asked, ‘Are you listening, because I am not going to repeat this.’ Kate nodded, and Elliot continued. ‘I got in touch with my true feelings by learning how to mask them very early in life. When you realize that your true feelings are most likely going to get the shit kicked out of you, you learn how to hide them for as long as you have to. You wait for a safe place to express them.’ He smiled and gave Kate’s hand a gentle squeeze. ‘Like I do with you and Brice. But I wouldn’t tell a kid to try and find a best friend and a lover here at Andrew Country