Дэвид Левитан: Boy Meets Boy

I must fight the urge to freak.

I find an old Dallas thermos and put the flowers inside. Their color complements Charlene Tilton's eyes nicely. The thermos is a relic from the early years of my parents' everlasting courtship.

Now that the flowers are in place, I'm feeling a little better. Then I hear my father's voice from the other room.

"Look at how big his thighs are here!"

Oh, no. The photo shrine. How could I have forgotten?

Sure enough, I walk in and find Noah framed by frames, the story of my transformation from pudgy to gawky to awkward to lanky to awkward again, all in the space of fifteen years.

Luckily, the thighs in question are on my six-month-old self.

"Pancakes are almost ready!" my mother calls.

We head to the kitchen. My father takes the lead, so I get to hang back a moment with Noah.

He looks perfectly amused.

"Do you mind?" I ask.

"I'm having fun," he assures me.

I know that other peoples families are always more amusing than your own. But I'm not used to my family being the other person's family.

"States or countries?" my father asks as we reach the kitchen.

"You tell me," my mother replies.

I have no idea why I'm surprised by this. It must be Noah's presence that makes me expect normal from my parents, even when I know this is rarely the case. Whenever my mom makes pancakes, they are usually the shape of states or countries. It's how I learned geography. If this seems a little bizarre, let me emphasize here — I am not talking about blobs of batter that look like California when you squint. No, I'm talking coastlines and mountain ranges and lit-

tle star imprints where .the capital should be. Because my mom drills teeth for a living, she is very, very precise. She can draw a straight line without a ruler and fold a napkin in perfect symmetry. In this regard, I am nothing at all like her. Most of the time, I feel like a perpetual smudge. My lines all curve. I tend to connect the wrong dots.

(Joni tells me this isn't true, that I say I'm a smudge because I can see my mother's precision growing inside of me. But let me tell you—I could never make two separate pancakes that fit together the way my mother's Texas and Oklahoma do.)

My parents steal glimpses of Noah. He steals glimpses of them. I watch them all openly, and nobody seems to mind.

"How long have you been living in town?" my father asks, perfectly conversational.

Just then, my brother busts into the room, leaving a trail of tennis sweat.

"Who are you?" Jay asks, pouring a little syrup on Minnesota before lifting the whole thing into his mouth.

"Noah." I like that he doesn't explain any further, and that he resists saying "It's nice to meet you" until he figures out whether such a statement is true.

"Another gay boy?" my brother says to me, then sighs. "Man, why can't you ever bring home a really cute sophomore girl to fall desperately in love with me? Do you have any cute girlfriends? Dogface doesn't count." (He and Joni go way back; she calls him Dungbrain.)

Before I can say anything, Noah steps in. "I was going to set you up with my sister," he says, "but you just blew your chance."

Jay stops chewing and pauses before making a grab for Arkansas. "Is she hot?" he asks.

"Your sister?"

"She's malaria hot," Noah tells him. "Isn't that right, Paul?"

"I had to look twice when I saw her," I chime in. "And I don't even like girls that way."

Jay nods in approval. My mother swats his hand with a spatula as he goes to stick his finger in the leftover batter. My father looks at us both, wondering how he can have two sons who make him feel so midway.

Finally, Jay starts to talk about practice, and Noah and I get our share of the edible nation.

My mom asks us if we want more ("I can do provinces, if you'd like"), but we both take a pass.

We're ready to leave the house.

"I'd like to meet her!" my brother shouts out as we head for the door (after thanking my mom profusely). It takes me a second to realize he's talking about Noah's sister.

We have a laugh about that as we bound down my front path. : "Where now?" we ask each other at the same time.

Both of us hesitate, not wanting to be the first to answer.

Finally, we can't take it.

"The park," we say at the same time.

Which is very cool.

We hold hands as we walk through town. If anybody notices, nobody cares. I know we all like to think of the heart as the center of the body, but at this moment, every conscious part of me is in the hand that he holds. It is through that hand, that feeling, that I experience everything else. The only things I notice around me are the good things—the mesmerizing tunes spilling out from the open door of the record store; the older man and the even older woman sitting on a park bench, sharing a blintz; the seven-year-old leaping from sidewalk square to sidewalk square, teetering and shifting to avoid stepping on a crack.

As if by agreement, although we haven't made a plan, we head for the paddleboat pavilion. A lone duck greets our arrival. To our right, the skatepunks swoosh-ride on a ramp made of hemp, speeding to queercore thrash and the sound of their own bodies merging with the wind.

To our left, a posse of Joy Scouts takes guitar lessons from a retired monk. (We used to have a troop of Boy Scouts, but when the Boy Scouts decided gays had no place in their ranks, our Scouts decided the organization had no place in our town; they changed their name and continued on.)

The pond's surface is like a wrinkled blue shirt, with small buoy-buttons marking the distance of water. The paddleboat wrangler has named the boats after his seven daughters. From the time I was little, I've always chosen Trixie, because she's orange and has the funniest name.

This time the paddleboat wrangler lifts his eyebrow at me because I go along when Noah chooses the light green Adaline. I like the idea of following his whims. I like the idea of going with him into a boat I've never been in before. Trixie has seen me with Joni and Kyle, other friends and other guys; she has also seen me paddle alone for hours, trying to sort out my problems by leaving a wake. Adaline doesn't know any of my secrets.

Noah and I start to talk about our favorite books and our favorite paintings — sharing our Indicators, hoping the other person will appreciate them as much. I know this is a normal early-date thing to do, but it's still unusual to me; since I've lived in the same ; town my whole life, I'm used to dating people I already know well.

There are always smaller mysteries to unravel, but I often have the general picture right in my mind when the dating begins. Noah, however, is entirely new to me. And I am entirely new to him. It would be so easy to lie—to make my favorites the same as his, or to pick more impressive choices. And yet I tell the truth. I want this all to be the truth.

The paddling pond isn't very large. We intersect it at constantly different angles. We shift direction like we shift conversation — in slow, subtle, natural ways.

"I don't do this very often," Noah says to me. "You know, go out."

"Neither do I," I assure him. It's mostly true, although not quite as true as what he's said to me.

"It's been a while."

"What happened?" I ask, because I sense he wants me to ask.

But maybe I've sensed wrong. He stops paddling for a second and his looks dark-cloud on me.

"You don't have to tell me," I say quietly.

He shakes his head. "No . . . it's okay. It's one of those things that you don't want to come up, but you know it has to come up, and then when it does you hope that once you've talked about it, it won't be that important anymore. It's really not a very interesting story. I liked this guy a lot. And I thought he liked me a lot, but in truth he didn't really like me at all. He was my first boyfriend, and I made him my everything—he was my new life, my new love, my new compass point. I guess that's the danger with firsts—you lose all sense of proportion. So I made a fool of myself, even though I didn't realize it at the time. I was so devotedto him."