You're Married to Her? Read Free Page A

friends, retired B movie actors and former TV variety show dancers who took the Long Island Railroad from the city, no one I had remotely heard of, but who were openly gay and played suggestive games of charades and broke into Cole Porter songs at the piano. This was the life I might have been born to had I been lucky, the
life I caught glimpses of in The Thin Man movies; the café society, the flip repartee, the urbane drinking, the cigarettes that seemed to punctuate conversation like a conductor’s baton. I adored being included and would never have done anything to jeopardize my place in the family; then one day an odd thing happened.
    Allison and I were in the pool. Her father was grilling porterhouse steaks at the far end by the diving board, her mother swilling drinks on the chaise lounge not ten feet away, telling a story about the first time she met Sinatra—when I felt a hand in my bathing suit. It was Allison’s hand and it was no shy brush with temptation, but a determined attempt to milk the cow. Through the haze of Beefeater martinis and the rising smoke from the steaks, no one noticed. Later that afternoon in the pool house I tried to run my hand under her bathing suit and got a firm No! in response. But the following Wednesday on Marina’s day off, while her mother was in the kitchen heating meat loaf, I felt Allison’s fingers tugging urgently on my zipper. As her mother finished the better half of a bottle of Beaujolais and sang along to the original cast album of South Pacific , Allison stuffed her hand inside my fly. I told her about the empty cabanas at the beach club where my friends took their dates to make out. She had no interest. I begged her to meet me under the boardwalk. She said it sounded sordid. She suggested we do things that I had never imagined, she knew exactly what turned her on, but it was only when her mother might catch us. I
got my first blowjob while her mother was upstairs watching The Brady Bunch . It may be that for the rest of my life I will associate cunnilingus with the sani-rinse cycle of the dishwasher because I spent many evenings on my knees between Allison’s legs as she braced herself against the kitchen sink while her mother was walking the dog.
    I was terrified of being caught, of being thrown out of the perfect family, but on the last weekend in June her father asked if I’d like to be his daughter’s date to an awards dinner for TV stars in New York City, to sit at the table with the family and all his most important clients. Her mother winked. “We’ll see Ricky.”
    Just some boy I used to know. A big jerk, was the way Allison referred to Ricky Fox. A freckle-faced redhead with a glossy pompadour and a lean, rubbery dancer’s body, he was a fixture on National Educational Television, a kind of public broadcasting Mouseketeer. Nothing went on. Our parents were friends, was all Allison would say when I pressed her about sex. I had never “done it” with Allison, but I imagined Ricky Fox had. And the less she wanted to talk about him, the more I imagined.
    Back at home my own mother and father were engaged in one of their prolonged periods of silence. They would occupy the same bedroom, stare at the same black and white television set while sitting at opposite ends of the same couch; eat at the same table, take slices of pizza from the same box, and pretend the other did
not exist. Important information was conveyed loudly enough to be heard but addressed solely to the children, so that if I, or my middle brother, were not at home my father might ignore my mother and tell the 3-year-old, “I’m getting a colon biopsy tomorrow. If they find cancer in the polyps, my will is in my top drawer under the socks.” But somehow the idea of their oldest son on live television awakened a shared sense of possibility, united them in a quest, and I became the family project.
    My father volunteered to rent me a tuxedo