Stereopticon

I’ve mentioned before that it’s tempting to think of the people in my life as some sort of traveling commedia del’arte troupe in which the actual actors may change, while the roles stay the same. Just as there’s always a Pagliaccio, always a Harlequin and a Scaramouche, my life always seems always to have people playing the same archetypes over and over again.

Zanies. Schemers. Lovers. Heroes. Confidants. Tempting, as I said, to think of people I know only as their roles. When I see people I know walking through life with the same gait and taking the same paths as those I knew before them, I try to concentrate on their differences. We’re all similar to others in many ways, after all, yet it’s those differences that most of us should be prizing.

Still, sometimes the parallels are spooky.

I mentioned last week that in college I had a mild crush on a boy named Jefferson. Jefferson was in my college class year and lived in the next dorm over. I noticed him the very first week on campus. Like me, he was tall and extremely lean. His hair was like a light auburn cloud; it smelled of mousse whenever he’d walk by. He wasn’t exactly handsome, by any means. His eyes were too small and beady. There was an irregularity to his jawline that made him keep his chin close to his chest in self-consciousness. His profile wasn’t effeminate, but it was almost feminine in its delicacy; I remember him being something like a character from Japanese anime, with his nose and chin coming to little points as if drawn with single, delicate strokes from a pen.

Whenever I passed Jefferson, he’d look at me. Most of the time when I saw him on campus, he’d be loping along the pathways with his head down, his lumpy jawline concealed, eyes on the ground. It was as if he was attempting not to be seen. When he noticed me, though, his eyes would fix on mine. They’d remain locked until we’d pass. I would always smile at him, but he’d leave his face blank and without expression. Or what he thought was without expression, anyway, because I could tell that Jefferson’s stares were laden with yearning—and sadness. I was experienced enough to suspect that he didn’t know, however, exactly what he yearned for.

During my sophomore year I found out Jefferson’s surname and boldly sent him an email through the campus system. I simply asked him if he’d like to get together and have dinner at the student center or play Ms. Pac-Man at the Tinee Giant. We’d never met, never talked face-to-face. In his reply he seemed to know who I was, though, and didn’t say no. Why would we want to do that? he asked.

I didn’t have a smooth answer. You looked like you might need a friend, I finally said.

For my last three years of college, I’d send an email every couple of months. Casual notes, saying nothing, but offering companionship. We certainly never mentioned anything naughty, but the looks we’d exchange as we passed on campus grew more and more heated. Still we never spoke.

Until the last night I was in Williamsburg, that is. The night before graduation, I received an email message from Jefferson asking if he could visit me in my dorm room. I lived in a single, then, all alone. My clothes and books and belongings were packed in boxes and stuffed into paper bags, ready to be loaded into my parents’ car trunk after the ceremony the next day. The room was down to bed and cinder block walls and a stack of movables in the middle of the floor when he finally arrived, nervous to the point of trembling.

I closed the door, and invited him to sit on the bed. He obeyed, and stared straight ahead, his legs together, his hands resting on the mattress. I reached out and covered his hand with mine. Almost immediately he jerked it away. “I don’t like anyone touching my hands,” he said, and showed them to me. They were covered with the ghosts of past incisions. I learned that the dent in his jawline had been the result of a tumor, in high school. The skin of his chest and hands and arms was a white tracery of scars from the dozens and dozens of cysts and tumors that had grown and been removed all his life.

“I don’t care,” I told him. “I like you. I’ve liked you since the first time I saw you. I thought you might like me too.” He nodded, and looked at me with his tiny eyes.

That was when I kissed him.

We made love that night. I undressed him, and made out with him, and sucked him off, and let him touch me in the places he had always wanted. I could tell he wasn't experienced, by his clumsiness and passivity. It was only his second time ever, he told me, after. He stayed until early in the morning, when he collected his shirt and his white briefs and sat on the edge of the bed with his head hung low. “This isn’t who I am,” he said. I was puzzled. Did he mean the one-night stand? The scars? “I’m supposed to get married and have kids and be normal. Sorry, but this isn’t who I am.”

Oh. The homosexuality.

He pulled on his clothes and went back home without a word, exiting stage left from the theater of my life. I didn’t see him at the graduation ceremony.

There’s another kid I know these days—Jason’s his name. He’s twenty-five, married, a father of four already, and secretly gay. He’s an expert at compartmentalization, and manages to justify to himself that his secret quests for cock and cum are just him ‘cutting loose’ when the wife is out of town or busy for the evening. He’s always treated it like some kind of hobby he can give up at will, like wood-burning or model railroading. He’s one of those young men whom you know will age quickly. Already his hair is thin, and his small eyes are rimmed with dark, tired circles.

I used to fuck Jason a year or so ago. I stopped because he wasn’t always reliable about showing up, though we’ve remained on friendly terms. He’s constantly prowling online under various vaguely sinister-sounding nicknames, changed every six weeks to keep his wife off his track. He’ll message me and tell me about his latest cocksucking escapades or complain about his life. His wife’s the bread-winner of the family; he works a part-time job stocking fruit at a local market. He finds a lot to complain about.

Jason’s always full of plans. Sometimes he wants to go back to school. Other days, he wants to start his own business, if he could get the money. He’s wanted to join the Peace Corps, even. He won’t admit it, but all his plans amount to the same end: he wants to get out. Every time I talk to him, he wants to unburden himself of the wife and the children and the responsibilities he assumed too young.

“You know anywhere a guy can go to get a quick circumcision?” he phoned me earlier this week.

“Huh?” I replied. It’s just one of those questions one never really expects to be asked.

He repeated himself, then added, “I’m thinking about joining the army tomorrow.”

“Why in the world would you join the army?” I asked him. I’d never known him to be particularly patriotic.

“Because if I waited any more there won’t be any damned Arabs left to kill,” he replied. While I was trying to think up a stern, tactful, fatherly reply to that one, he messaged, “Kidding, dude. I need to be doing something important with my life.”

“I don’t think they require circumcision in the Army.”

“I heard they do.”

“I’m pretty sure they don’t,” I said, “Adult circumcision is painful.”

“I’ll get over it. I just need to make a change.”

“That’s just a weird change,” I told him. “Are you talking shit so you can run away from your family? You’re a father and a caregiver. Isn’t that an important thing to do with your life?”

“That’s not who I am,” he said, and for the first time since I’d known him, he sounded sad.

It was at that moment I realized that Jason reminded me of Jefferson. The thin and air-dried hair. The small, dark eyes that looked more often at the ground or the horizon than at other people. His skinny frame. Even the paleness of his skin. It was as if I’d been given a glimpse into Jefferson at the age of twenty-five, four years after the night we spent together, having done the acceptable thing with his life. Having learned that the married life wasn’t really him, after all.

I know Jason’s not Jefferson. Those weren’t even Jefferson’s words in his mouth—they were the words of thousands of men and women who’ve found themselves yearning for a life other than the one they lead. Yet it still felt as if I had placed an old-fashioned stereopticon to my face. Two slightly different pictures seen from slightly different angles, converged into one three-dimensional portrait, rich and strange in its vividness.

Then the moment passed, and the two went back to being their individual selves once more.