Jeffrey McGowan - Major Conflict

It began to feel almost like an addiction, something I was forever trying to stop. Just when I would get to a place where I’d feel certain that what I was feeling for Greg was simply the bond of male friendship, I’d say something or do something that went past the boundaries of simple friendship. After hanging out upstairs at Grand Central, we’d usually go down to the number 7 train below, where he’d wait for the westbound train to Times Square, and I’d wait for the eastbound train to Queens. One night as my train pulled in I jumped up from the bench Greg and I were sharing on the subway platform, planted a kiss firmly on his left cheek, and then rushed into the train just as the doors were beginning to close. As the train pulled away I looked through the graffiti-scrawled window to see Greg still sitting on the bench, looking somewhat stunned, one hand pressed up against the kissed cheek. A few nights later, standing in Rockefeller Center, the RCA Building lit grandly in front of us, I suddenly found myself grabbing Greg’s shoulder and turning him toward me and saying, “I like you. I want you to be my pal.” Later on that night, as we passed under the marquee of the Guild Theater on Fiftieth Street, Greg turned to me and said with a smile, “I like you, too, Jeff. I want you to be my pal.” And I said, “Ah, c’mon, you like me more than that,” and Greg’s face fell, he seemed embarrassed, then a little angry, and without thinking I pulled my ROTC pin from the front pocket of my jeans and handed it to him. “I want you to have this,” I said, and all the anger and embarrassment rushed from his face and he smiled again and hugged me.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this act of giving my ROTC pin to Greg, of connecting the two seemingly irreconcilable aspects of my life in one simple action, was the closest I would come to uncompartmentalizing my life, of bringing together the soldier and the man, for several years.

But the ROTC pin wasn’t enough, of course, for Greg. Having come out at seventeen, leaving Pittsburgh to come to New York, Greg was light-years ahead of me on the gay curve. He was ready to have a relationship, and he became increasingly less tolerant when I’d suddenly close up and continue to insist that I was straight. I sensed that he’d fallen in love with me and that this love gave him an almost Herculean patience when it came to my being totally honest about my sexuality. But even that had its limit, and one night near the end of April everything snapped and he reached that limit.

There’d been some talk at work about us, and I’d gotten paranoid. I was working the twelve-to-eight shift, he was working the nine-to-five, and when I came in at noon I ran into him taking a smoke break in the back staircase that led up to the sales floor. I told him we had to cool it, we couldn’t hang around each other so much, and then I told him that should the subject of his own sexuality ever come up with anyone at work, he should act as if he was straight, he should deny being gay. Looking back now, I honestly can’t believe how naïve I was, and how selfish. Did I really believe Greg would do such a thing? Did I really believe I had a right to ask him to lie about himself? Amazingly, I think I did. But I underestimated him.

A confused look came over his face. He took a quick, long drag on his cigarette, staring at me the whole time, incredulous, as if he were seeing me for the very first time. Then, stabbing out the cigarette hard in the big plastic ashtray that was kept on the ledge there, he said, shaking his head, “I love you, Jeff, but I can’t do that. I just can’t… .” I thought he was going to start crying, but he pulled himself together and flung open the door to the sales floor and rushed out. “Wait, Greg,” I said, and I raced out after him, grabbing his arm just as he reached the large display table covered with travel books in the center of the store. It would have been hard to find a more conspicuous place, but I wasn’t thinking. “Ouch, damn it, Jeff,” Greg yelled, rubbing his arm. I’d grabbed too hard. “Why don’t you just rip my arm out of the socket, you idiot,” and he turned and continued walking toward the information desk in the front of the store. “Wait, Greg, I’m sorry—I…” and then I looked around and saw that, with the exception of the cashiers in the pit ringing up sales, everything else in the store had slowed down or stopped completely. I felt as if I’d been dropped into a film that had suddenly been switched to slow motion. Customers on the open staircase above the travel section paused between steps and looked down. Clerks shelving books in the back slowly turned their heads toward me. People browsing the green Michelin guides stopped browsing and looked up. Jane Light, the older woman who ordered the travel books and anchored the information desk, stopped talking and dipped her head down and looked out over her glasses at me.

I froze. It felt as if the ground had just disappeared from under my feet. I got hot and dizzy, and I imagine I turned beet red. I looked down at the table of travel books, then squatted down, as if I were looking for something in the overstock section below. I tried to breathe while listening to the store return to normal. I heard Jane Light’s voice resume, and footsteps on the stairs again. And then I grabbed a travel guide, hurried back to the door to the back staircase, rushed inside, and took the steps down two at a time.

We avoided each other the rest of the afternoon, and when he left at five, I was relieved. This was it, I promised myself. No more hanging around with that faggot. I wasn’t going to do it. But then around seven-thirty he called the store, slightly drunk, from J’s downtown.

“We have to talk, Jeff,” he said, sounding frantic, as if he’d been crying.

“No, nothing to talk about,” I said curtly, ready to hang up on him.

“Meet me, Jeff, please, meet me in front of the church at Fifty-fifth when you get off.”

There was a pleading in his voice. I hesitated, but then hung up. Thirty seconds later the phone rang again. I picked it up.

“What,” I said. “What do you want from me?”

“Please, Jeff, you owe me this much, just meet me in front of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian when you’re done with your shift. We can talk on the way to the train.”

“What will it take for you to understand?”

“Oh, I understand, Jeff, I understand you better than you understand yourself!”

“Fuck you,” I said under my breath. I was standing at the information desk. “And don’t come up here. Don’t come up here! Stay down there at your faggot bar!” And I slammed the phone down. I was so angry I felt sure that if Greg had been standing in front of me I would’ve beat the shit out of him.

After finishing my shift I hurried through the revolving doors and started walking briskly down Fifth Avenue. It was the last week in April, an unusually warm night, humid, windy, strange. It felt like rain. They’d been calling for rain all day, and I’d brought my big golf umbrella with me to work. At Fifty-sixth Street, while waiting for the light to change, I took off my suit jacket and flung it over my shoulder and loosened my tie.

I’d calmed down since the phone call from Greg and managed to get him out of my head. I had homework to do when I got home and ROTC matters on my mind. The light changed and I crossed Fifty-sixth Street. I passed Harry Winston, the famous jeweler, and was just approaching the Rizzoli Bookstore in the middle of the block when I noticed a figure standing up on the steps of the church. I realized that it was Greg, always so solemn, with his books and his worn-out shoes, his school-boy sweaters and his old blue corduroys that shone from too much wear. I froze, then made a beeline to the street, started walking across Fifth, trying to act as if I hadn’t seen him. But he’d seen me, and he started coming after me. “Jeff! Jeff! Wait!” he shouted, and I started to run then, down Fifth Avenue. But he was faster than me, and by the time I reached Fifty-third Street he’d caught up with me. The light was red and there was traffic and I felt trapped.