Jeffrey McGowan - Major Conflict

In those few moments during the orgasm the world seemed to switch from color to black-and-white, and now, suddenly, though a part of me wanted just to enjoy the easy languor of lulling about in the afternoon heat with Greg, a larger part of me had me jumping up and pulling on my white briefs and jeans and rushing off to the bathroom. When I returned to my room, I was hoping Greg would be dressed and ready to go, but he was still lying there in the breeze from the fan, a peaceful half-smile on his face.

“You should get dressed,” I said. “My grandmother might come home.”

“Oh, okay,” Greg said, and he lazily pulled himself up and started putting his clothes back on.

After he was dressed he said, “So, what should we do now?”

“I really need to do some stuff around here. How about if I just see you tomorrow at work? You know how to get to the train from here, right?”

Greg looked a little crestfallen, but he said okay and stood up and drew near to kiss me good-bye. I grabbed him and kissed him hard in the middle of the forehead. “Happy birthday,” I said. He looked a little startled but just smiled and turned around. I walked him to the front door, and he was gone.

After he left I straightened my bed and sprayed the room with Lysol, convinced that the smell of sex was everywhere, and then I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. But a few hours later it was all I could think of again, and I decided to try to write a note to let him know how I felt. I wanted it to be clear that I liked him a lot as a friend but that the sex wasn’t going to happen again. I wasn’t gay; we were just friends. After a half-dozen false starts I finally came up with this draft, which I ended up copying onto a yellow notepad and giving to him the next day at work.

I suppose it was a function of my confusion and emotional immaturity that allowed me to believe that this note said what I wanted it to say. I handed it to Greg in an envelope the next day at work and told him to wait until he got home to read it.

For the next month or so I felt like a crazy man half the time, crazy thinking about Greg, and then crazy with guilt after having sex with him. Greg complained that we spent less time just hanging out, but I always felt so guilty afterward that I couldn’t bring myself to hang out with him the way we used to. I was learning to compartmentalize my sex, to keep it in a nice box that had nothing to do with the rest of my life. Greg didn’t want to be kept in a box.

Finally, the summer ended, and I threw myself back into school and ROTC, deciding once and for all that I wasn’t gay, and that the thing with Greg was just a phase. I went back to part-time at the store and managed to avoid Greg as much as possible. There was one last fight, and that was it. Deep down, I think I knew Greg was right, but I wasn’t anywhere even close to dealing with it. And being a soldier meant too much to me. So I deliberately switched off the light, leaving him in the dark, and he gave up, I suppose, and I suppose I broke his heart again, for the second time in a single year.

That fall I kept myself busy with school and ROTC and a part-time schedule at Doubleday. Greg got a new job, at a small, academic publisher downtown, but he continued to work part-time at the bookstore at night. This made things easier. Though we still ran into each other occasionally when our shifts overlapped, we didn’t see each other much and were able to abide by a relatively civil truce when we did. And this is how it went for the next few years. I had classes all week, Wednesdays were ROTC, and I worked at Doubleday Thursday through Saturday. Unlike high school, at Fordham I tried to get involved as much as possible, socially and otherwise. I studied hard and partied a good deal. And that year, my sophomore year, I even got involved in student government, getting elected president of my class.

Like most of my friends, I dated girls casually in these years and had a few of the standard late-night drunken fumblings that characterize college life. Commitment was never much of an issue. The most memorable of these casual dates was a girl named Eileen, whom I met at Clarke’s, one of the local watering holes that catered to Fordham students. It was the spring of my junior year, and my roommates and I were hanging out at the bar at around one in the morning. Eileen walked up to me and introduced herself. She looked familiar and I said so, and she said she was in my Soviet foreign-policy class. We hit it off right away. She was sweet and smart and had a great sense of humor. There was a softness to her that seemed to blunt my own oversize clumsiness. We talked for a few hours at the front end of the bar. Periodically, one of my roommates, none of whom was getting lucky that night, would interrupt us to monitor my progress, jealous that I was one step closer than he was to getting laid. One of them would appear to make some lame remark and then disappear. I figured since Eileen was willing to put up with them she was pretty interested in me. After the bartender had made last call around three-thirty, she asked me to walk her home. I said sure and then yelled over to my roommates that I was leaving.

Eileen and I talked nonstop all the way up Fordham Road, laughing at our own bad jokes, and at the thought of my roommates hovering over us at the bar, watching my every move. When we finally got to her room in the mini-skyscraper on campus, known as the “Fives,” she turned around and looked at me keenly. Without really thinking I gave her a long lingering good-night kiss that lasted for about twenty minutes, and then we exchanged numbers and kissed again, briefly.

We arranged to meet again the following weekend at Clarke’s. We closed the place again and I walked her home, but this time, when we got to her door in the “Fives,” she invited me in. Truth was, I’d enjoyed her company and her conversation so much that I’d kind of forgotten about sex. And as we started making out and then actually having sex, I found myself disappointed because I thought it would be more exciting than it was. This wasn’t the first time I’d had sex with a woman, but it was the first time I’d had sex with one to whom I felt so connected, whom I liked so much. Everything worked perfectly, physically speaking, but the whole thing felt perfunctory, it lacked real passion, it lacked the vitality and sheer animal quality I’d felt with Greg and would later feel with other men. Eileen was beautiful and I liked her, but having sex with her felt like an intellectual exercise. It seemed entirely quantifiable, easily explained, unlike sex with a man. For me, the experience of sex with another man, I’d already learned, was unquantifiable; you just knew it was great. And it was this very fact that made it so special; it was the fireworks I’d been watching in the movies for years finally translated into the language of my own heart. An-drew Sullivan once said that having sex with a woman was like watching black-and-white TV, whereas having sex with a man was like watching the same TV in full Technicolor. I couldn’t agree with him more.