My Best Man by Andy Schell (unputdownable books .txt) 📗

is part of the famous drag entertainer Chad entourage, though I have no idea who Chad Barclay is. Chad working on a play titled Theatrica: She’s Hitched with Librium. love the title and try to be as funny. Of course, that never

I’m a bit uncomfortable at the party, because everyone is actor or writer, or painter or something worthy, and I realize journey into the skies is kind of an embarrassment. I stop tellin people I’m a steward and just say, “I travel,” in a way that them not ask further.

Halfway through the party I lose Iris, but decide to find because friendships like hers are what I miss most about my in Dallas, and I’m only in New York for two days. Someone they saw her and Aaron headed for the roof earlier. I scout outside hall and find the steep ladder steps that lead to the in the building’s roof. I climb slowly, because I’m a little and pop my head into the frigid winter night. I hear what like a scuffle. I look to the right and see Iris and Aaron ten feet away on the roof. Aaron is driving her back forcefully. is crying. It’s all very Hitchcock the cool blonde in the dress; the dynamic fellow, a magician by trade, shadowing her a rooftop in New York. Is he trying to kill her?

No. He’s fucking her.

Iris had told me over the phone that she was having a little with Aaron. Iris and I have been tight friends since school,

we’ve wondered aloud what it would be like to sleep together, but never really felt the need to find out. I am gay, after all. But then again, so is Aaron.

At the moment, he has her off-the-shoulder 1950’s dress gathered up in his hands, and he’s using it for balance as he rocks into her, steadily, driving her back, until they brace against an air duct. My first thought is, “How’s he maintaining a hard-on? It’s freezing.” My second thought is, “How’s he maintaining a hard-on? He’s gay.” As for my first question: He’s left his pants on, and though his dick is pulled through the fly of his pants, it’s certainly not waving in the midnight air. As for my second question: Iris has her hands around his neck, she’s kissing all over his face, and she’s so excited she’s crying, and he seems to be equally enthralled, meeting her kisses with wild passion. So I guess he’s not that gay. Still, I find this fascinating, and since they’re completely unaware of me, I continue to watch.

I’m cold. My ears are hurting already, and my fingers are nearly frozen to the pipe I’m using to steady myself. But I keep watching. I can’t believe that Aaron is giving it to her so cocksure and that Iris is abandoning herself so freely and getting so much pleasure from him. I remember what Amity sounded like when she was being ridden to the finish line by Bart, and I wonder if she’d be so vocal coming down the home stretch with someone like Aaron or me?

I CHAPTER

SIX

/- Amity and I are just roommates,” I declare, standing in kitchen with my mother. “I know that,” my mother says, mixing curry into mayonnaise a very exotic dip for the Midwest. She’s it herself, because she’s scaled back our family maid, Marzetta, minimal hours on account of Donald, her new husband, who anything worth doing should be done by yourself. I watch her as she stirs. Like Amity’s, they’re too young for the rest of but only because my mother has had not only a face-lift, but hand-lift also. My late father’s golfing buddy, Bud Orenstein, plastic surgeon, tried his experimental hand-lift surgery on mother and it actually worked. Of course, she has little scars at wrist points, but those are covered by gold bracelets cut to a fit so that they never move from their camouflage position.

My mother is secretly relieved that Matthew and I have up, she tells me. It’s much easier to talk to her friends about she explains, now that I’m living with a girl down in Dallas. whoever this Amity is, she is good enough for my mother. said is you should bring her up here to visit sometime. It’s” that I meet her.” She smoothes her auburn hair with her left

“Why in the world is it important you meet her?”

She places the dish of curry dip on the platter and spreads the crudit6s around it. “She could be the beginning of something new and wonderful for you.”

My mother, like Bart, like so many people, thinks I just haven’t found the right girl. She doesn’t believe that anyone is gay. She thinks that Liberace has “a rare form of masculinity” and that Richard Simmons is just “playing a role.” She thinks if I’ll just get on with it, I’ll be happy.

If all learning was by example, perhaps I would. The day after my father killed himself, she sweetly instructed the maid to take his Cadillac, the very one that had put him to sleep, and return it to the dealership for credit. And a month later, she used that credit toward the purchase of a new car for her new husband, my new stepfather, Donald, a retired general in the air force who fought in the Korean War, as well as in Vietnam. He’s sixty-something years old, but has the body of a forty year old. He’s handsome, in a John Wayne kind of way, though his hands look as if they were transplanted from a gorilla. I suspect the reason he still has a full head of hair is because he’s not given any of it permission to fall out.

They met at a golf tournament at the country club It was one of those mixer things where you draw your partner’s name from a golf hat. Donald, whose wife had succumbed to cancer just six months prior, drew my mother’s name. When she